Till death do us part. Rarely has the parting arrived so soon as in the marriage of King Jason to his Queen, Alceme. Her hand in his, the lovers lean in for the kiss that will mark the start their life together. But the consummation is over before it begins: Alceme sinks to the ground, all vacant eyes and bluing lips, an arrow shaft quivering from her bosom. Jason spins on his heel to see a group of Ionian archers fleeing across the palace ramparts, then turns back to see his wife now dead and his heart now broken.

It’s far from a subtle Greek tragic opening, but Liquid Entertainment’s take on the mythical premise is certainly a swift and efficient one. In less than 30 seconds we’ve established a hero, a villain, a motive and a revenge theme that will draw nations and heroes to arms. Still, as you sprint toward an enemy soldier, dodging his flaming arrows before, in a single, swift and fluid motion thrusting your spear through his neck, one thing is clear: Euripides, this is not.

The Jason of this action-RPG, much like the character depicted in the 1960’s Don Chaffey film of the myth, is an alpha male pin-up with an improbably large shield and a six-pack that ripples all the way up to his neck. The first twenty minutes of the game take the form of a pursuit in which you steamroller through enemy ranks, slicing torsos from limbs with enraged ease, switching between your sword, spear and mace with a single tap of a button in a big, dumb, gruesome action sequence.

The mechanics are straightforward: you’ve a light attack, a heavy attack, and a shield barge that can be used to shove enemies away from you. You can combo attacks together, switch between weapons mid string and use the R2 to apply modifiers to your attacks for special moves. To start with the range of offensive interactions is adequate, if not generous, and while the combat is fast and fluid and the gore designed to shock, there’s really nothing here we haven’t seen before. So far, so Conan.

But when you finally reach Alceme’s killer and either pause to let him have a final soliloquy, or break open his face and let the life drain away through the wound (your choice) there’s a clue that this is an Action RPG with a difference. Text, subtle text, flashes up on screen: ‘You drove the Ionians from your palace in Ioclus’, and then ‘You avenged Alceme’s death by killing Ephoros’. The proclamation of these deeds is more than mere narrative underscoring. In Rise of the Argonauts, deeds are the currency by which you grow stronger, not only in terms of the plot but also in terms of your power as an interactive entity.

You can read the rest of this preview over at Eurogamer here.

“My total time played is 110 days, 23 hours and 11 minutes. See? No time at all compared to some!”

This is Lindsay Machin. For the last three years she has spent every day or so playing make believe in the magical kingdom of Vana’diel. It’s a lifestyle with which I’m familiar: battling monsters, earning gil, questing with friends and strangers into the early hours. After all, four years ago it was me who sold her the entry ticket.

Delve into the world of an MMO and you’re buying into more than just a video game. You’re taking on a new reality, one that makes almost as many demands of you to succeed as real life does. A year or so in to the first global console MMO, Final Fantasy XI and I needed out but, having imported a PlayStation 2, harddrive and copy of Final Fantasy XI from America at great expense, I also needed some recompense.

That’s where Lindsay came in. I sold her my MMO life via an Internet forum as a way out. Now, nearly four years later I’ve tracked her down to find out what happened when the experience left my hands and fell into hers.

I’m wary of MMOs; they steal time in a more relentless and vicious way than other videogames do. I‘ve see friends’ lives turned upside down by their unyielding intrusion. And the thought that I pushed something so potentially ruinous onto another human being has nagged at me for the last few years. I’ve some guilt to assuage.

“So, I guess my first question is…” I pause. “Actually, truth be told it’s probably my only question. Did I ruin your life?”

“Hehehe. You saved me a lot of money actually. Think of all the other games I would have bought if I wasn’t playing FFXI every night. Actually, I did still buy a lot of other games, but I just didn’t play any of them…” She seems sure. Too sure perhaps.

“Ok. Seriously, did I ruin your life? What’s the stat for your character’s logged time in weeks and days? Tell me you never lost a job or a boyfriend because of this game. Please.”

It’s a reasonable question. While we in the West are yet have any of those Korean news stories of withered boys dead at their screens after three straight days spent playing an MMO, Square-Enix still saw fit to put a warning at Final Fantasy XI’s start up screen. “Have fun in vana Diel,” the message reads each and every time you log into the game. “But don’t forget your family, your friends, your school, or your work.” Even the publisher’s aware that this is a videogame that can ruin lives.

“You did not ruin my life,” she answers, two parts smiling, one part annoyed now. “I have made real life friends who I love through playing FFXI. Some of us meet up every 6 months or so, but I’m in regular contact with three people who play, and through them have made even more real life friends, including some who I consider to be amongst my closest now.

“It’s never affected my work or my love life,” she continues. “I was lucky enough to have a boyfriend who joined in a month or so after I bought it from you, but he quit 6 months back, around the time we broke up. As silly as it sounds, I find it a little hard still playing without him. I’ll go to particular zones or take part in certain events he used to like, and I get a twinge he’s not there. My total time played is 110 days, 23 hours and 11 minutes. See? No time at all compared to some!”

Still, it’s 110 days (or 2,663.18 hours) that I’m sort of responsible for taking from a girl’s life. Phileas Fog circumnavigated the globe in less time than that.

So why have you kept playing, I ask. Is it people or game mechanics? “Hmm, I would say both,” she replies. “But mainly the people. I formed a static party with some friends and we slowly crawled to 75, the cap, together. We had such varying work hours it was hard to get together but we stuck at it, and the day we all made level 75 was just brilliant. After all the deaths, to finally make it: I really think that helped me keep going.”

While it’s the Grand Theft Autos of the world that attract the most mainstream consternation over our hobby, within the fold it’s the MMO that’s courts the highest controversy. Braid’s designer, Jonathan Blow famously described the design principles behind the MMO as being ’unethical’. I ask Lindsay whether she thinks the genre is constructive or destructive?

“I think they can be both. It really depends on the type of person you are. I think if you get sucked in so you do forget about work, and family and friends, chances are you have an addictive personality. What’s to say you wouldn’t be doing the same but with gambling, or chatting online, or cross-stitching?

“Having said that, the whole reason behind MMO’s is grinding, grinding, grinding; be bigger, be better, be stronger! And that takes time – a lot of time. And I suppose it’s far easier to get obsessed with leveling than with stitching. However, I’ve found it constructive: it’s enabled me to play with and talk to people from all over the world. I love that escapism.”

Few players have time to maintain more than one virtual life. For this reason MMO developers work hard to keep the users they have, to constantly discourage what is perhaps an inevitable exodus. I ask what would it take to convince Lindsay to up and leave Vana’diel?

“I would never, never, play another MMO. As much as I’ve been saying to you that I don’t play too much and the game’s not ruined my life, I couldn’t get into a game as deep as I have this one ever again. Having said that, when I’m booted, kicking and screaming from the servers, I would move onto FFXI-2 in a heartbeat… So many people I know keep saying ‘Play WoW, play WoW!’ and I just don’t understand that. I have my MMO, I don’t want anything else.”

And if and when the day arrives when it’s time to leave Square’s servers for the last time, what then? I wonder whether Lindsay would ever think about selling on, not just the system and game as I did to her, but also her very online identity, her character?

“I’d never sell my character. For a start, she’d be pretty much worthless as I’ve just spent so much time pottering about wasting time I only have one job at cap and no money. Also, she is mine, dammit! The thought of her being used by someone else actually distresses me. A good friend offered to keep her going when I had a wobble about quitting a few months back, but I didn’t even want him to have her…”

“That sounds so silly but it’s how I feel. If I did ever sell an MMO character, I don’t think I’d feel guilty about it: if someone’s at the place where they want to buy a character, they must have some inkling of what they are getting in to, and be OK with that. It’s fine for you to feel guilty though, Mr Parkin, because I had no idea what I was getting into at the time you sold me Vana’diel…”

Now the million gil question. If you could go back to when you first responded to my forum for sale advert, would you buy the machine again or, knowing what you know now, would you pass it by and not get involved?”

“I absolutely, positively would buy the package again. As silly as this sounds, the game’s really made a difference to my life. I probably wouldn’t be where I am now without it, and I wouldn’t have some of the favourite people I have in my life now. If I hadn’t met them, I think I still would do it again. FFXI has been one of my greatest gaming experiences.

“And, come to think of it, also one of the saddest and most poignant at times too. When one of my closest friends in the game quit for good, we met up in game and talked for a while, reminiscing about our experiences. Then he gave me a rose and logged out for the last time. I cried. I really did. Hah. How lame… I still have the rose he gave me. Did you ruin my life? No, in many ways you made it better.

“So, thank-you, I guess.”

This article first appeared on Game Set Watch here yesterday.

Second hand game sales are an inescapable fact of the gaming industry.

While Japan came within inches of legislating its way out of the practice , even slapping a ‘NO RESALE’ logo on every new game produced for a while, the law was quashed and Akihabara’s second hand boutiques carry on unscathed.

Anyone who creates and sells videogame product must come to terms with the fact that they’ll never see a penny from the many consumers who legitimately pay to play your title, the proceeds of the sale instead being pocketed by Game or Electronics Boutique and so on.

Indeed, without second hand game sales many of those retailers who do offer new and second hand product side by side on store shelves would see their business models collapse. Arguably new game sales would suffer as a result, consumers used to paying for their new games at least in part with their old ones, no longer able to service such an expensive hobby.

Gearbox Software, developer of Brother’s In Arms Hell’s Highways, released today on Xbox 360, has come up with a novel way of getting gamer’s to hang onto their game even after it’s finished.

A number of the game’s achievements are dependent on the player continuing to log in to Xbox Live and play the title on a daily basis for a considerable length of time. The first, ‘Focused’ delivers 25 points for those player who, while connected to Xbox Live, play the game once a day for a week. Easy money. The next, ‘Committed’, doles out 50 points to those play the game once a week for three months. Still pretty easy but definietly moving into irritating. Next, ‘Obsessive’ adds a gigantic 100 points to your gamerscore if you manage to play the game for once a day for 100 days. Um, that’s a no from me.

As if all that weren’t enough, one final achievement, ‘Remember September ’44′ rewards players with no less than 50 achievement points for simply playing the game at some point on September 17th, the anniversay of the events depictied in the game. As you have to be connected to Xbox Live at the time, there’s no way to cheat by fixing the time on your console’s clock, meaning that gamers who want the full 1000 points on offer will have to hang on to the game for close to a year from now (and then remember to put the blasted thing on).

It is perhaps a cyncial ploy (certainly in the case of the first three rewards) to keep gamers from trading in their game after a week as well as to keep them playing it more regularly for much longer than they might have otherwise. Bribing players with kudos points (such that they are) is a dubious practice and one we hope other developers don’t ape. Far better to spend your time ensuring the game is good and enduring enough to keep player playing on its own merits than buy them off.

This is not the Africa of the brochures, of mustard savannahs, shimmering waterholes and slow-motion cheetah kills. There are no excitable anthropologists roaming these villages, no jeeploads of middle-class safari goers heading out in search of big game. This is not the Africa of the National Geographic.

This is, rather, the Africa of an unassuming sidebar story at the back of the international news section, of indecipherable conflicts waged on forgotten grounds. This is the Africa of the guerrillas, those who fight over a carcass land stripped of resources by long-gone colonialist vultures. This is the Africa of potholes, of rusty AK-47s, worthless money, dusty shantytowns, sweltering poverty and buzzing malaria.

Far Cry 2 is a third world FPS; a place where your guns might lock up and fail at any moment, where medical attention takes the form of prising bullets from wounds with heavy pliers and where, if you want to buy a round of drinks for your buddies, you better hope you brought diamonds for the down payment.

Gone are the sci-fi elements, the clicking aliens and Wolverine-like feral abilities of Crytek’s Far Cry games. In their place Ubisoft Montreal conjures a heavy kind of realism beyond the stretch of most of the game’s immediate rivals.

All this is made clear during the game’s opening section, a long taxi ride from a small, makeshift airport to your hotel lodgings – 10 minutes and 3 per cent of the game away. The verbose driver delivers a near comprehensive overview of the socio-political situation that provides the backdrop to this most hyped and anticipated first-person shooter.

Your character, chosen from a roster of nine multinational options, lounges in the backseat. He admires whatever you point his eyes at in the 360-degree view that’s rolling past: a farmer driving oxen through a shallow river, light aircraft streaking overhead (“they’re not coming back…”) or dusty military convoys.

En route checkpoints must be tactfully eased through (“You guys thirsty? You want me to pick you up a beer on my way back?”) while on the radio you hear for the first time about the United Front for Liberation and Labour (UFLL) and Alliance For Popular Resistance (APR), two warring factions who control the area and your destiny in the game.

Your mission is to assassinate The Jackal, an arms dealer supplying both sides of the conflict with guns and ammunition, stoking the fires of ongoing conflict as he does so. And your mission, as your character spills from the backseat onto the sand and into the throes of early onset malaria, is over before it’s even begun.

Sick and incapacitated. It’s a brave way to begin a first person shooter, a genre defined by violence, aggression and power. But make no mistake: the Portal-esque twisting of convention doesn’t for last long. Five minutes later, dazed and blurry-eyed, you’re staggering to your feet from a bed on the floor, groping for your pistol in an effort to fight your way out of a UFLL/APR skirmish that’s erupted outside your bedroom window. From here on in, the rules are as old as videogame time: shoot them before they shoot you.

Of course, most gamers are less concerned with all this plot, premise and geography than they are with the game’s much-vaunted visuals and, in this regard, the tested Xbox 360 version satisfies rather than amazes. Far Cry 2, the console version, certainly matches its closest system rivals – but it rarely surpasses them, save perhaps in the small details.

You can read the rest of the piece over at Eurogamer here.

This sort of viral stunt usually impresses literally nobody except the marketing exec who “came up with” the idea.

But this one from Nintendo/ Gamestop is so well-executed that it’s the kind of thing you actually want to share and celebrate rather firebomb Hoxton and Shoreditch (or whatever the NY new media district equivalent is) over.

It’s a good idea that’s consistent with communicating the game’s core mechanic. Excellent work.

(Via Mr Blackett)

Friend of Chewing Pixels, Graham S, points us to a majestic New Yorker article on ex-crime reporter turned TV writer and director David Simon and his valuable television show The Wire.

Reading on screen text of this kind of length can be literally painful and the Yorker’s layout here exacerbates the eye strain but the words, both from the players therein and the writer who frames them, are wonderful.

The article covers all angles of the show, from its initial pitch stage (Simon wrote to HBO management: “It would, I will argue, be a more profound victory for HBO to take the essence of network fare and smartly turn it on its head, so that no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like C.S.I. or N.Y.P.D. Blue or Law & Order again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows.) through to its closing moments in the fifth and final series which aired in America and over Bit Torrent earlier in the year.

There are some wonderful anecdotes (Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, “Man, you need a fix more than I do.” Royo refers to that moment as his “street Oscar.”) and for the fans of the show – which should frankly be everyone reading this – it’s illuminating stuff.

One thing that cuts through everything I read about David Simon is his sense of purpose and ambition. “The Wire is dissent,” he says in the piece. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.”

His themes throughout the show are laser-targeted, every scene loaded with meaning and purpose but wrapped up in a rare sort of believability. Lack of authenticity is something he’s damning of in other crime shows. ““So much of what comes out of Hollywood is horseshit. Because these people live in West L.A., they don’t even go to East L.A. The only time they go downtown is to get their license renewed. And what they increasingly know about the world is what they see on other TV shows about cops or crime or poverty.

“The American entertainment industry gets poverty so relentlessly wrong… Poor people are either the salt of the earth, and they’re there to exalt us with their homespun wisdom and their sheer grit and determination to rise up, or they are people to be beaten up in an interrogation room by Sipowicz… How is it that there’s nobody actually on a human scale from the other America? The reason is they’ve never met anybody from the other America. I mean, they could ask their gardener what it’s like.”

Oof.

Slate called the show the best American television series that had ever been broadcast saying, “No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.”

If you’re yet to see it, start now. As Simon himself points out in the piece, it will take you a little while before you’re hooked (“You know how, in a Russian novel, the reader does the work for the first hundred pages, and then it turns and you’re lost in it? With ‘The Wire,’ it might be Episode 6 before it turns and you’re in.”) but there are few better things you can spend your leisure time viewing.

Then, when you’re done head over to this New Yorker piece for a sharp articulation of everything that you loved about the experience.

If you read nothin else of the piece, then ensure you take in its conclusion, a rare happy ending born from a mythology that delights in bucking Hollywood format and revelling in unresolving downward spirals.

“Not long ago, Simon pulled off a coup that only he could have. It combined his media savvy, his loyalty to the people he’s written about, and his commitment to changing the way the underclass is represented. In “The Corner,” Simon and Burns had written extensively about a woman named Fran Boyd, a smart, likable person who had a devastating addiction to heroin, and whose first husband eventually died of his addiction. After Simon and Burns finished reporting the book, they introduced her to a man named Donnie Andrews, who was serving time for murder. Like the character Omar in “The Wire,” Andrews had robbed drug dealers at gunpoint. Eventually, he killed one.

Andrews had turned himself in to Burns, and Simon had written about him. Burns sensed that he was somebody who could support Boyd in her flickering hope of getting off heroin for good. As Burns told her, “You think you know it all? Well, I’ve got someone for you.” After Burns gave Boyd’s phone number to Andrews, the two began talking for hours on the phone every week, and Andrews, a former heroin user himself, persuaded her to change. For twenty-eight harrowing days in the Baltimore Recovery Center, she got detoxed, and, over the next twelve years, she became a drug counsellor for recovering addicts, a far better mother to her two sons, and a guardian for two nieces and a nephew, all while lobbying to get Andrews released. She and Andrews fell in love. In April, 2005, after seventeen years in federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona, Andrews was freed. The two made plans to marry in Baltimore, in August of this year.

Since Boyd and Simon first met, they had become close friends. In fact, she and both of her sons played small parts on “The Wire”; her younger son even became an assistant film editor on the show. When Simon heard about Boyd’s engagement, he jumped into action.

In recent years, Simon had become an unlikely fan of the “Vows” column in the Times—the Sunday feature in which a couple’s wedding is described in detail. Wouldn’t it make a statement, he thought, if Fran and Donnie’s wedding was covered by “Vows”? Usually, the couples were privileged: Ivy League graduates in Vera Wang dresses and Armani tuxes. Simon called up one of the “Vows” editors, introduced himself, and made his pitch. When the editor called back to say she liked the idea, she told him that the paper wanted to do a feature article about Boyd and Andrews as well. A few weeks later, the editor told Simon via e-mail that the “Vows” column had been cancelled. That made him mad. “Having Fran and Donnie in the ‘Vows’ section was inclusive and smart, an unspoken triumph for the N.Y.T. itself—a democratization,” he explained to me in an e-mail. “To do a feature was far less so—in fact, it was the opposite, in a way. As if such a marriage were grist for a news feature but unsuitable to be considered among other romances.”

So Simon called Bill Keller, the editor of the Times, and made his pitch again. Are you saying, Keller asked, that you’d rather have the “Vows” piece than a front-page feature? Yes, Simon told him, strange though it might seem. Keller said that he’d have to think about it and call him back; he was a fan of “The Wire,” but this decision would have to be made on its merits. In the end, he called Simon and said that he’d read the feature and it made him want to go to Fran and Donnie’s wedding. The feature ran—on the front page of the August 9th edition.

The “Vows” column ran on August 19th. It said that Boyd and Andrews were married at a catering hall in Baltimore, by the pastor of the A.M.E. church where Andrews is now head of security and does anti-gang outreach work. According to the Times, the bride wore a strapless, beaded wedding dress. The groom wore a black tuxedo with a pink tie. They marched down the aisle to the accompaniment of a Luther Vandross song, “Here and Now.” The guests included the actors Dominic West, Sonja Sohn, and Andre Royo from “The Wire.” David Simon was the best man.”

Perhaps the word that best defines the current generation of console hardware is ‘unreliable’.

After the most recent PlayStation 3 Firmware update one of my Dualshock controllers simply stopped working. Then, of course, there’s the fact that I’m now on my fifth Xbox 360, four previous models having fallen to Microsoft’s $1.15 billion three red ring defect.

My most recent machine died in dramatic form, refusing to even power up again after blinked its last. This meant I had no way of removing the Rock Band disc from the tray (I’ve since been informed it is possible to do this manually if you remove the front of the machine but I didn’t know that at the time).

While Microsoft advise customers to ensure no discs or peripherals are sent off to the repair centre with machines, as far as I knew that was literally no way for me to get the game out. So I used sellotape and A4 paper to plaster an ALL CAPS message to whichever overworked repair engineer received the package, warning that my game was in the drive and could he/ she ensure it was sent back with the fixed console.

A few days later a brand new Xbox 360 turned up at my house with a note explaining that, to save time, the repair centre had simply sent me out a new one. Efficient and convenient, for sure, but my game was nowhere to be seen.

All huff puff and indignation, I called up Xbox support. Fifteen minutes later I had the assurance they’d track down the missing game and call me back.

Two weeks later I called them back to find out if they’d made any progress.

“Ah. Sorry sir. For some reason this was never followed up. I will personally write a note on your account and make sure we get your disc back for you. Somebody will call you back in 72 hours.”

72 hours later, this e-mail message arrives:

We have conducted an internal investigation and have determined that there was no game in the Xbox console when we received it at the service repair centre.

With regards,

Xbox Support

Translation: “You’re a big fat liar. XOXO, Xbox Support.” Now this has become a thing. I’m saying this (and I know I’m right because I put the disc in right before the console broke) and they’re saying that and how the hell does this end well for me?

I call the number on the e-mail:

“Listen. Why would I lie about Rock Band being in the tray, a game that requires multiple additional peripherals? Why would I lie about that? I have the peripherals here in my house, cold and redundant. Why are you calling me a liar?”

“We’re not calling you a liar sir, I can assure you of that”

“Yeah… The thing is that, you are literally calling me a liar. I say the disc was in the machine and you say it wasn’t. One of us isn’t telling the truth and you’re saying that person is me.”

“Sir. I have personally spoken to the manager at the repairs centre and he has checked the console’s arrival log report and there is no mention of a game disc being present in the console in that log.”

“OK. But conceivably the engineer who filled out that log form could have neglected to mention there was a disc in the tray, right? He might have pocketed the disc instead or perhaps, despite my extremely visible note indicating the presence of a disc in the tray, he filled out the form before he fixed the machine and realized there was a disc in the machine?”

“Yes sir. That is why we recommend that you remove any games from the console before sending it to us”

“BUT…”

“Yes sir, I realize that the machine wouldn’t switch on so you couldn’t get the disc out. We’re sorry about that. Really, we are”

“…”

After I hang up, Mrs. Chewing Pixels asks me why I didn’t mention what I do for a living. I like to think I didn’t mention the game journalist thing because I wanted to experience the same treatment that the common user receives; so that I can talk with some verisimilitude of the terrible ways in which The Man treats its consumers.

But really, I kept schtum for fear that the guy on the other end might reply: ‘Um…yeah. And?’

If I had the time, money and fervour I’d book a trip to the repair centre in Germany under the guise of reporting the repairs process for some magazine or other. Then I’d meet with the supervisor, get the name of the engineer who received my machine, look him in the eye and say: ‘J’ACCUSE!’ or whatever the Germanic equivalent is.

We could compare Xbox Live dates to see when I stopped playing Rock Band and when he started and the evidence would be CONCLUSIVE and I’d twizzle a Poirot air moustache and feel totally righteous and smug.

But really, it’s just a £35 theft against somebody who gets the vast majority of his games for free. In a world of gross unfairness this is a flea-sized injustice that’s pretty easy to swallow.

Still, it’s the principle that matters and, my disc was definitely stolen. As the machine wouldn’t even switch on until it was repaired, it’s a pretty safe bet on who that person was.

Moral of the story? Don’t send your discs in to the repair centre when your Xbox inevitably dies.

Admittedly, as morals of stories go, it’s a pretty weak one, seeing as that’s the exact same thing Microsoft advise customers to do themselves but still, a thief that issues a warning before he kicks you in the shins and robs you is still a thief, right?

It’s time for another movie-themed web game! This one’s a shoot ‘em up me and a couple of dudes at Littleloud just finished working on for the new Ben Stiller/ Jack Black/ Robert Downey Jnr vietnam spoof, Tropic Thunder.

All the usual gaming caveats apply: this was a five week project in which we had to build a shoot ‘em up engine from scratch so no time for proper AI routines etc yawn etc.

Still, it’s turned out pretty sweet I think: you have a machine gun, a smart bomb and rows of wimpy extras to mow down, so the stage is definitely set for FUN.

We managed to squeeze some online leaderboard integration into the build for Paramount and, as the criteria for scoring is pretty involved, hopefully there’ll be a really good spread of high scores depending on a player’s speed and skill.

Pop over to www.tropicthundergame.com to have a look. (Note: If you find a bug I literally don’t want to know).

London Lite is one of those free newspapers you wouldn’t even paper a cat litter tray with.

It’s all: ‘Check out this unflattering picture of Peaches Geldof in which she looks like she’s had a few too many! HA! Doesn’t that make you feel better about the dread routine of your working day!’

Your cat would sneer at the insult, which, come to think of it is pretty much all that cats do. You get the point.

Anyway, the paper’s strap line is: ‘Printed with ink that won’t come off on your hands’.

Occasionally you read a sentence that’s intended to be dry and functional but which, viewed askance, bristles with a kind of weird profundity. Thom Yorke’s good at spotting phrases like this. Reportedly his lyric, “An airbag saved my life” was lifted from a headline in a car safety leaflet pushed through his front door.

Anyhow, the London Lite strap leaped out at me across the tube aisle today. Still, it’d be more poetic if it was ‘Stories that won’t come off in your hands’, a line that would also make an excellent title for a fanzine or short story collection.

Mao, the 1578-year-old schoolboy star of Disgaea is super cross. His father, the Overlord of the Netherworld, accidentally stepped on his SlayStation Portable console and, in doing so, destroyed 4 million hours worth of save data for Mao’s favourite videogame.

It is, without doubt, the worst thing that’s ever happened to the heir to the Netherworld throne, who decides that the best way to teach his clumsy father a lesson is by killing him.

It’s a narrative premise that should resonate with the series’ audience. As players of the first two games can testify, should a Disgaea manage to get its hooks in you’ll lose your mind to it – all other games becoming temporarily obsolete as every moment of free time is ploughed into your new Strategy RPG obsession. The idea of save game corruption 200 hours into creating a perfectly balanced team of thieves, ninjas, star mages and Majin is, in this universe at least, legitimate grounds for patricide.

So it is that Disgaea’s inimitable humour makes its debut on the PlayStation 3, a migration from the PS2 that’s brought with it scant technological progression. The jagged, untidy character sprites are indistinguishable from those in the previous games. The outrageous team-up battle animations and ground-shaking magical effects are no less creative, but no more impressive, than they’ve ever been.

Menu screens and 2D character portraits benefit from pin-sharp HD treatment, but players hoping the jump to the current generation might have evened a balance that has always favoured function over form will be disappointed.

Not that this is a genre anybody really plays for aesthetic wow. The option to turn off animations, turning movements on the chessboard-style maps into darting hops and reducing attacks to mere numerical readouts are all present. The developer knows that for most serious Disgaea players, graphical frippery is a barrier to the game’s true first fruits: intelligent levelling, long-view planning and red hot XXX stat porn.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here