War is hell, man. Not that you’s know it from the average output from the video game industry. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had a fairly well executed anti-war message but it kinda got over shadowed by handing the players a big machine gun and entertaining them by hitting the front lines and kicking ass. The ‘war sucks’ mentality is much better articulated in the grim survival game This War of Mine. Rather than directing units as a General in an RTS or hitting the front lines in a FPS you get handed control of a small group of civilians caught in the middle of a civil war.

Essentially the country is fucked. Large chunks of the city is in ruins and food and shelter is scarce. You little group of desperate civvies have taken refuge in the bombed house and, over the days that follow, you have to make the place liveable, produce and salvage enough food to get by, stay warm and stay happy. During the day you can instruct your characters to build furniture and work stations that can be further used to prepare food, grow herbs, distill liquor, sleep, read, build tools and whatnot. When the sun goes down you can pick one of the nearby areas to send one of your group to salvage.

While on a salvage stint you can search areas, collect items for crafting and survival, steal and progress further through the use of crowbars, shovels and other items. Sometimes the areas will be occupied and you’ll have to decide if you want to rob them, putting your needs ahead of their own, or trade with them. Other times the people you encounter are hostile and you are best to try sneaking through the place without getting caught. Hostilities can turn violent and you’re rarely going to come out of an encounter completely intact. With only limited time each night for a salvage you have to think fast, especially if you get a situation where the nice, happy people setting up residence in the hotel turn out to have people locked in cupboards for torture and murder fun.

If things go south one or more of your characters will become emotionally affected. If they’re forced to steal from the helpless or defend themselves they could fall into depression and could need recovery time around the homestead, possibly with other characters working to support and get them on to their feet. It feels a bit odd that your intentions may not be reflected in moods of the characters. Dispatching a group of heavily armed and generally unpleasant rebels who are holding a bunch of supplies may seem like a public service but the game degreed this a bad thing and my best salvage guy wound up to depressed to move for days.

During the day you can also have random encounters including traders coming to the door, new survivors in need of help or people who need you to head out and help them. Each of the characters have their own set of skills like trading, fast running or good cooking.

The control scheme is pretty simple, clicking on year you want to move and interact with. Clicking on an object such as a door or workbench will give you the options available to you. The only sticking point comes in the awkward switching between the combat and salvage modes that can put you in a vulnerable position at a crucial moment. 

There are a few small annoyances but the pros do outweigh the cons. When you are forced to make a tough choice it feels like a real ethical dilemma, but when you have little control over how depressed your character ends up it distances the player. Nonetheless it’s a well thought out experience that puts the player into a unique position in the current market. The cross-hatched sketch style of the game blends well with the smooth animation for an overall good presentation, supported by a decent soundtrack. It’s worth checking out during the next Steam sale (but not the current full price).

Publisher: Cryptozoic

Players: 2-4

Play Time: 45 Minutes

Genre: Dice rolling, hand management

Review: Oh dear. Oh dearie dear. Here’s a game that went from Kickstarter success story to cautionary tale. After the Lovecraftian themed reverse-Monopoly launched on the crowd sourcing site it reached it’s goal and then much, much more, instantly marking it as a board gaming event (having one of the creators coming off the back of Gloom helps). Then the trouble started. It was revealed that the money collected was never intended to produce the game but launch a company to publish it. With the game not physically being in production and problems piling on one another the entire project was cancelled and the backers were left out of pocket. Nobody was happy.

Cryptozoic eventually stepped in and took the production on, supplying the backers with their long overdue game. Reviews were mediocre with many hardcore players unimpressed with the luck based game mechanics. Recently I had to chance to secure myself a once-played second hand copy. Why did I buy it?

LOOK AT THOSE PLAYING PIECES!!!

Paul Komoda’s highly detailed, intricately carved figures of Lovecraft’s monster mash are the star of the show. They are without a doubt the most amazing player pieces in my game collection. The jarring contrast between the bright, cartoon style arts across the rest of the game only adds to the fun, and players will enjoy stamping their massive Elder God along the happy, goofy looking board. I’d say 90% of the reason I went out and bought it was for those figurines.

Then I played the game. In a subversion of Monopoly you begin by placing houses and resorts on each of the streets around Atlantic City. You then roll the dice and move your chosen Old One around the board. When you land on a street you roll again to destroy one of the houses. If you destroy the last house on a street you can put down one of your Gates to earn a bonus for the area, travel between gates and get closer to winning. When a player opens their sixth gate they instantly win. Each player also gets a DOOM card that outlines a set of circumstances under which they can also win the game, with opportunities to swap for a different DOOM card during the progression of the game.

Each ‘character’ comes with their own set of abilities, and Providence cards can give you a total of 3 special abilities. Chants cards can provide larger one-of bonuses that can be activated at a cost. One big addition to the rules that sets the game apart from it’s obvious inspiration is the ability to attack other players by rolling dice against each other. Chants and Providence can improve your odds at destruction, attack and defence and a successful attack lets you take from your opponent’s stash of Cultists. Cultists and destroyed Houses form the currencies for the game, being spend primarily for Chants, Traits and completing DOOM cards.

If you run out of Cultists or land on the wrong space you can wind up banished to the outer realm, the game’s equivalent of Jail. When you wind up banished you have to collect new cultists and roll less than the total number of cultists to re-enter the game.

Don’t play The Doom That Came to Atlantic City with a competitive player because they’re going to hate it. It all comes down to luck. Movement, combat, destruction…everything is determined by the dice. There’s very little strategy to be had beyond picking your character traits and choosing when to use your bonuses. If you want something that is based on skill, look elsewhere.

However…

For a nice, relaxed hour of rolling the dice and making smashing noises as you guide Cthulhu down the pier to stomp on a house, trying not to giggle when chant your beasts name to unbanish them, or dropping the poor mistreated cultists down a dice tower as a sacrifice it’s a good time. The game works, it’s fairly well balanced and it looks great. The amount of fun you can have with it is down to how serious you take it (less is better) and what you’re drinking. I’ll be playing it on good, casual game days.

Do you want to paint a target on yourself? Go on to any social media site and say something – anything – with the #gamergate hashtag. Regardless of your views on this topic using this phrase potentially puts you in the crosshairs. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to have stalkers at your door and death threats in your mailbox like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, but you can expect bullying, labelling and plenty of accusations as to your motives.

On one side of the fence we have the group who claim that there is a culture of sexism in both video games and the people who play them, and this pervasive attitude is behind the recent controversies surrounding Zoe Quinn and her game Depression Quest. It was on the back of this issue that the term ‘gamergate’ first emerged. The other side of the fence is occupied by those who claim the real issue here is ethics in video game journalism, that reviewers were being influenced by their relationships with developers. The umbrella term ‘GameGate’ has been used by both factions, and has appeared millions of times on Twitter within months of being coined. Six months after it first appeared the expression still attracts lots of attention, attacks and criticism in all aspects of the media.

It’s time to stop using #gamergate.

This issue has come back onto our radar since Australian Pop Culture convention Supanova booked actor Adam Baldwin for one of their 2015 tours. We are fortunate in that we haven’t lived under a cloud of threats since the matter went public. Discussion on the Supanova Facebook and Twitter feeds has been heated and ongoing. Let’s try and summarise how we got to this point.

Two years ago game developer Zoe Quinn released the browser game Depression Quest. It was purported by some that the game had received undue positive attention due to the developer being a woman and her alleged relationships with journalists. Criticism turned in to harassment, which escalated in September 2014 when Quinn’s ex-boyfriend published a letter online where he claimed Quinn had conducted several affairs with men in the industry in order to further here career, in particular earning a positive review from online publication Kotaku. Although it was revealed that Kotaku had never published the alleged review, with the journalist in question having begun an affair with Quinn after commenting on the game in an article, Quinn was subjected to long term sexual and violent abuse. Anyone who criticised the actions of the harassment became targets themselves.

Baldwin coined the term ‘GamerGate’ when he shared videos criticising Quinn on his Twitter account, claiming that this was further proof of an enforcement of ‘arbitrary social justice rules’. The hashtag quickly overtook the phrase ‘Quinnspiracy’ in discussions about the issue. It became the common perception that the term was being used in the systematic harassment of female developers, their supporters and indeed anyone who criticised the current state of gender roles and perception in the gaming industry. Others promoted the use of the hashtag as a way to criticise the issues surrounding gaming journalism outlined above.

Herein lies the basic problem: we have two issues here. Yes, the two issues are intertwined and have come to the front of public awareness due to the same series of circumstance, but two issues nontheless. When #gamergate gets added to post about sexism in video games you immediately get a bunch of critics turning up claiming that it’s ‘actually about ethics in video game journalism’ – an expression that was so overused that it has become a punchline. Whenever someone would respond to an accusation of sexism by claiming it’s about journalism you immediately diminish the former issue in light of the latter. No doubt many insidious minds took this as an opportunity to dismiss an issue they disagreed with or felt uncomfortable with with the claim that it’s not the real issue at all.

So after six months of bickering, bullying and bullshit, the #gamergate hashtag should be dropped. And that’s not to say that the issues should be dropped. Sexism in games is an issue that needs examined and journalism ethics is an issue that needs to be on the table. Most importantly we need to treat them as two different issues because, as we’ve seen, the public can not get their shit together to reach a resolution on either when they’re both in the conversation.

Let’s look at issue #1: sexism in video games. Sexism, and gender representation, in video games is a thing that exists. Whether you like what Anita Sarkeesian said or not, she was right. The way women are depicted in gaming and, more importantly, the way women associated with the industry are treated, is not right. Women are treated as romantic or sexual objects in the bulk of gaming, and as we’re moving on as a society that trend will have to change. Games like Dead of Alive: Beach Volleyball will still exist because they’ll always be a market for it but it would be ideal for games to cover a wider gamut of gender representations. I have a son and a daughter who are both beginning to play games and I would like role models of all types for them.

Then there’s the sexual, violent and abusive harassment that people have been faced with. It’s downright despicable that anyone would act this way, especially in such ridiculously high numbers. Whatever crimes you think any of these women are guilty of they cannot be subjected to treatment. It’s low down, wretched and primitive behaviour. If you do want to push the idea that the wrong thing has been done by these people then mounting threat upon threat on them is counter-productive to your agenda. The media and the public are going to focus on the threats, not your agenda. Either way, cut that shit out. The world is changing, gaming is evolving – accept it or find a new hobby.

In this context the hashtag #gamergate has become something of a call to arms, added to any post about gaming sexism for the sake of drawing the attention of trolls and harassers. Baldwin himself has been guilty of this, frequently retweeting his detractors and adding the tag as something of a beacon to his supporters to bully those he disagrees with.

Now, video game journalism. Let’s say, for example, that a writer was influenced by his relationships to write a positive review (which didn’t happen in this case). This is a thing that does happen across all journalism. As much as we like to think of the media as an unbiased moderator of the facts, the second you put human beings in the mix things go out the window. Gaming journalism is a relatively new profession, and it has largely been born out of the internet. The result is that we have a largely unregulated form of reporting which initially focused on a niche market. Things have changed over the years and the gaming industry pull in billions of dollars a year, with prominent outlets being followed by thousands and thousands of people. What they say matters, in that it has a dollar sign attached to it. Early reviews of the new release The Order 1886 has already seen a number of pre-order cancellations.

It’s time for the gaming journalism to re-evaluate itself, allow for greater scrutiny and be transparent about self-regulation and conflicts of interest.

Let’s get both of these issues on the table. Better yet, let’s get them on two separate tables. They can have their own hashtags, such as #gamingethics and #gamingsexism. This won’t solve the problems, or stop folks from being insufferably horrible people, but it means we can focus long enough to make progress. More importantly it will stop one issue being shot down in favour of another because someone is getting precious about their hashtag. It will help put a stop to anyone using the term from becoming a target for vicious harassers.

It has already been reported in Australia that some professionals have boycotted the Supanova convention for their inclusion of Adam Baldwin on the guest list and their overall handling of the matter, with some wanting to remain anonymous because the assumption is that such an action will result in further threats and harassment. Six months on any association with the hashtag still leaves people afraid. On their Facebook feed anyone who has expressed concerns about Baldwin’s appearance have been dubbed a ‘SJW’, a label that seems to exist solely to try and quash any opposition without the trouble of forming an argument or response of your own. The organisers of Supanova have now come forward to say that they have been on the receiving end of harassment as well.

In short, in the current situation nobody is gaining anything and nothing is being resolved. Perhaps someone smarter than me can come up with a way to put both issues at rest, as what I’ve presented here is quite a narrow look at the overall issues. All I can suggest is putting the hashtag #gamergate to rest and tackling these issues anew. And not be dicks.

We don’t usually get into iOS and Android games in this series because the once innovated platform for creativity has become a cesspit for knock-offs and endless ‘games’ designed to strain every last cent out of players pockets. We do keep half an eye on the App Store though, because we occasionally catch something worthwhile. While Sherlock: The Network didn’t inspire much confidence in us, being a licensed property, the most reviled of genres, but it was free. And who can say no to that face?

Wait…let me find a better picture…

The first thing we noticed was the high production values the game boasted. Dropping the shows opening credit sequence into the app was a nice touch, but we were surprised when a video of Benedict Cumberbatch in his role of Sherlock Holmes introducing us to the game. Later we’d also get video of Martin Freeman and Mark Gatiss in their respective roles of Watson and Mycroft, as well as audio messages from them throughout the story. You are a member of Sherlock’s network of homeless, utilised to collect information and carry out simple investigations for the world’s foremost consulting detective.

From the beginning you have only one or two cases available. You get guided through different locations, each requiring different puzzles to be solved to provide all of the information needed to solve the case. From there it’s up to the player to put the pieces together to solve everything.The puzzles come a variety of familiar styles. Travelling the subway requires Pipe Dream types solutions, Slider puzzles for traffic jams, finding details in an image, deducing pin numbers, unscrambling audio and the like. Finally you get to the ‘Mind Palace’ where you pick out the key words needed to identify the suspect and motive.

There is only a limited number of puzzle types but they are classics, and the difficulty curve is steady enough to keep up the challenge. If you don’t have much patience for these types of games you’re not going to get much out of the experience but if you’re like me you’ll enjoy the brain workout.

Once the initial two cases are solved the game sets up a cliff hanger about Mrs. Hudson being kidnapped (which doesn’t seem to worry the titular anti-hero very much at all) and then hands you a bill to unlock the remaining ten odd cases. This doesn’t bother us much, as it is a once-off and it feels more like we’d played a demo of the full game rather than something that’ll continue to try and nickel and dime us for the rest of the game experience. Getting a taste test before paying a once off for the full amount is certainly a preferred business model than the Dungeon Master/Clash of Clans garbage. 

If you like Sherlock, and you like puzzle games at least check out the free case.

I’m an adult. Got a job and a car and children and everything. And like many people in my age group I play video games. Having been born in 1980 I was part of the generation who saw the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry during its infancy. We went to friends houses to play Atari, lined up at shopping centres to try a NES, got excited to see The Wizard, saw the Virtua-Boy hit shelves, took sides in the Nintendo/Sega war and debated polygon graphics vs sprites.

Throughout every era of home gaming we’ve had only a few franchises turn up time and time again. Mario, Zelda and the like are restricted to one brand, quickly forgotten when we became a Playstation house. From my Celeco-Vision days onwards many things have faded away but the Aliens keep turning up. It’s time to revisit that.

Alien

1982 – Atari 2600

It should be worth noting that most of these early games were released when my age was a single digit number, and I wasn’t allowed to watch the Alien movie series until I was older. When I saw this number in action it was quickly dismissed as a Pac-Man clone.

Which it obviously was. And a shitty one at that. Even shittier than Pac-Man on Atari, which is saying something. Moving on.

Aliens

1986 – Commodore 64

When this rudimentary (and way ahead of it’s time) first person survival horror arrived in our home I had an awareness of a movie called Aliens – there were posters everywhere, it was hugely popular and I wasn’t allowed to watch it. With this game I first learned a bit about it – what the aliens looked like, what a ‘Face Hugger’ was, there was a girl called Newt and a Queen. I also learned some of the characters names. Ripley was the one from the poster, and we assumed Vasquez knew karate because of what appeared be a Daniel-San headband on her image. My older brother did say that he (sic) was a karate expert in the movie.

Random sidenote on that clearly false piece of trivia. My older brother always thought of himself as an authority of all things even if he had to make stuff up to sell it. As we all know Vasquez wasn’t a karate master, or even male. He also claimed that the aliens seen in this game were ‘warriors’ because of the ‘spears’ being carried on their back (the protrusions that make up their exoskeleton. He also claimed that John Hurt in Spaceballs had an alien in him because he’d accidentally eaten an alien egg in the diner. My brother is quite a tit.

Back to this game though – it was pretty innovative. You could switch between the six characters at will and explore different parts of the colony, you could move from room to room at will and some of the environments were destructible. With decent graphics and music it was pretty creepy to see an alien coming towards your screen. The only problem was that every room looked near identical, so getting lost was an ongoing frustration. Never did get to the end. If there was one.

Alien

1984 – Commodore 64

This one came out before the aforementioned Aliens on the same system, but I’m going in the order I played them. This one was surprisingly innovated and complex, adhering closely to movie concept of there being one alien and little defence. You have the crew of the Nostromo at your disposal, and you move them in a turn based system. You can explore different rooms and open grilles to access the air ducts of the ship. You have a limited amount of time to trap the alien and destroy it before the ship returns to Earth and causes an outbreak.

Even though the presentation was incredibly simple the game was and remains a very tense experience. Anyone who played it remembers jumping clear of their skin when the green, bleeping alien suddenly appeared on their screen, leaving them scrambling at the keyboard trying to attack it. The human characters had a small degree of self-reliance and would move around independently, but one of them would be a traitorous android. Who the android is changes every playthrough, adding further unpredictability.

Due to it’s simple presentation and reliance on mechanics and atmosphere Alien holds up better than most games from the era. Bloody impossible to beat though.

Predator

1987 – Commodore 64

In the same stash of games we found Alien in was a copy of Predator. In a weird inconsistency of my childhood I wasn’t allowed to watch the mostly suspenseful and horror based Alien but had a copy of the blood and gore splattered violence-fest Predator on VHS from age 8.

This game is not on par with the previous two, nit by a long shot. Innovation did not play a large role. You begin as Arnie jumping from a helicopter and cycling through his crew as each of them get bumped off (although they all look and function in basically the same way). You walk from left to right, occasionally shooting enemy soldiers but mostly walking to long stretches of jungle while random glowing eyes appeared in the background or the screen turned into heat vision mode. Admittedly this was pretty rad.

As you progress you find each team mater lying dead on the ground (as above), each characterised by the shape of their gun. It’s a very easy game and you’ll have no trouble getting to the end, wherein the Predator would walk onto the screen, punch you a few times (or laser you if you open fire) and then walk away. Repeat until you’re dead. Supposedly the way to win was to somehow interact with the black rope against the black background to drop a log of the beastie, but we couldn’t work out how to make it happen and gave up out of frustration.

Aliens

1990 – Arcade

If someone can collect up all the side-scrolling fighting games from the 90s – like Final Fight, X-Men, The Avengers, etc. – into a downloadable package for modern consoles they could charge all the money. This genre of action games was the highlight of visits to Timezone until Street-Fighter II ushered in the golden age of tournament fighters. Although it wasn’t seen often, this precursor to the more famous Aliens vs Predator arcade fighter was pretty solid. Playing as a strangely blonde Ripley, players were equipped with a default Smart Gun (hell yeah!) and could pick up flame throwers, grenades and more to fight the hordes of aliens in levels based on the movie sequel.

As well as walking and shooting there were sequences of riding on the back of the APC, taking the controls of a power loading to punch up the enemies and boss fights that put you at the bottom of the screen Contra style. Konami expanded the standard alien, face-hugger, queen trifecta with a range of colourful variations that could fly, spit acid and shoot electricity, and early example of the Aliens marketing boom that occurred later in the decade with kid friendly action figures.

“Hi kids!”

Alien 3

Amiga – 1992

When Alien 3 came out it chose not to follow James Cameron’s shift to an action heavy take on the material and wind back Ridley Scott’s single monster and helpless victims motif. It wasn’t a bad idea. Unfortunately Alien 3 had plenty of other bad ideas, including this game. When the commissioned developers looked at the source material and pondered the ways they could make it into a strategic, innovative survival horror they settled on ‘fuck it’. Crew cut Ripley is facing down a horde of aliens rather than one, and comes packing everything from a pulse rifle to a flamethrower, grenades and the classic radar. Basically it’s Aliens done in the style of Alien 3. Ripley is tasked with exploring each level to find and free incubated prisoners before the chest bursters do their thing.

As a game it wasn’t bad, sluggish controls and frustrating inability to get on or off a ladder unless at ground level aside. The limited ammo and art design makes it creepy enough, and the aliens are well animated in the 2D environment. The level design was pretty imaginative with varied settings and good use of the air ducts (also lifted from Aliens). It could’ve been great but being a rushed out game license stymied the experience. Also, cutting down the prisoners renders the chest bursters void?

Alien 3: The Gun

Arcade – 1993

Meanwhile, at the arcades, game developers were still doing their best to ignore the fact that Alien 3 wasn’t an action movie. The rail shooter, very much an arcade staple that has all but died out, always brought players because you get to hold a cool plastic gun and shoot things on the screen. Swapping out the usual terrorists and bank robbers with aliens was fine by us, and the half-size plasma rifles mounted on the game cabinet had cool factor. There’s not much to say though, I always walked away from these games feeling like I’d wasted my money.

Aliens vs Predator

Arcade – 1994

Aw, hell yes! Everyone loved this game! Taking it’s cues from the comic series and mixing things up with a Japanese anime art style left the game free to play fast and loose with the alien lore and canon. Players team up as a hunter or warrior Predator (although they have the names and designed mixed up, pretty sure that the one from the original Predator movie was a hunter), a robot arm wielding Arnie and an original cyborg character who packed a katana and laser pistol. Armed to the teeth and with plenty of weapons to find on the way, you travel from left to right battling hundreds and hundreds of aliens.

Some of the designs are pretty cool even if they don’t make sense, such as the armadillo aliens, and how Arnie’s character turned up in the future with a robot arm is a mystery (a Terminator? Actually that makes sense). But such quibbles didn’t matter because the game was bloody awesome! Bright, colourful and packed with action, the massive hordes of easily killed enemies make you feel completely badass. You go through these things like a spade through soft sand and it’s immensely satisfying. Even if you don’t make it through the first level (those boss monsters balanced the field) you still walked away happy.

Aliens vs Predator

Jaguar – 1994

Another early example of the cross-over comic series making it’s way into other media, released the same year as the above arcade actioner. Although this game doesn’t hold up well today due to the limitations in technology (one of the last major FPS releases to use 2D sprite on a 2D plane) it created the template for the future series. You can play as the alien, predator or marine, each with their own goals and play styles. Some of it was pretty clever, like the alien being unable to heal itself instead capturing humans in cocoons and turning them into restart points.

One of the biggest limitations proved to be the biggest contributor to the highly praised atmosphere. None of the enemies made any noise when they moved around, so the only way to know if an alien was creepy up behind you was when the motion detector started blinging…by then it was to late. It was a decent title for the time, but not even this could save the Atari Jaguar.

Aliens vs Predator & Aliens vs Predator 2

PC – 1999/2001

Beginning to see a pattern here? In between film releases there wan’t much to market the duel franchises on other than beating the mucus out of each other. This home computer release provided an update on the Jaguar concept with three FPS campaigns, each focused on a different faction in the galactic war. What made the game impressive was how varied each campaign felt, with the stealth based, wall crawling aliens being the polar opposite of the straight forward, gun toting marines. The Predator sat somewhere in the middle, being able to turn invisible and use heat vision (to a limited degree) while packing immensely powerful weapons tempered by a battery pack.

Multiplayer really stepped things up for players, with a range of awesome modes to keep things interesting. Deathmatch was the most popular, but for less boring people there’s Last Man Standing, which saw one alien player enter a map with a number of marine players. When a marine gets killed they respawn as an alien, seeing the balance of power slowly shift from the marines to aliens. These games were very well designed and clearly made by fans of the series.

Aliens vs Predator

PC/PS3/XBOX360 – 2010

And here we go again…I guess the big difference between this one and the previous ones is that it’s desperately trying to emulate the last one. 1999s title was gangbusters and rather than trying to take it to the next level this iteration was trying to recreate the experience with shiny new graphics. Unfortunately it’s a rather bland experience, with the least interesting faction (the humans) taking up most of the campaign time searching for the usual audio logs that seem scattered across all sci-fi worlds these days. The aliens were a pain in the ass to control and the predator only popped up occasionally to fulfil contractual obligations. The game wasn’t bad, but it was astoundingly average.

It’s kind of strange that all the major releases have become part of the Aliens vs Predator franchise. Can’t we get a straight up aliens game any more?

Aliens: Colonial Marines

PC/PS3/XBOX360 – 2013

NO NO I DIDN’T MEAN IT! TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK!

Alien Isolation

PC/PS4/XBOXONE – 2014

Ok, we’ll give you one more chance. But it better be good!

…

That’s pretty damn good. Going against the action grain this recent release wound back the clock to set the game in the years following the events of Alien, complete with the old fashioned technology that appeared in the film. As Ripley’s daughter Amanda you’re working as a deep space engineer when you get word that the Nostromo flight logs have been found. When you arrive at the space station holding them you find yourself trapped in a nightmare. An alien has found itself on board and has been picking people off one by one, those that remain have turned into desperate survivors with a kill or be killed mentality. The ships AI isn’t helping either, having sent the store mannequin style androids out to kill the crew in the most creepy way possible.

This game has excellent pacing, astounding atmosphere, a great story and is downright terrifying in a way no other aliens based game has been. Yes, there’s one alien but you’ve got no chance of killing the damned thing – you’ll spend much of the early missions hiding under a desk and weeping softly as the creature lurks around the room trying to sniff you out. This is a fantastic game, made by people who clearly love the source material as much as we do. If you want to experience a real Alien game, this is it. But get comfy, the campaign is loooooong.

And now, a quick run down of the Aliens and Predator games I didn’t play because I had the wrong console or they just looked kinda shit (skipping ports and mobile games).

Aliens 2: Aliens

MSX – 1987

I question your use of the English language.

Predator 2

Amiga – 1991

Isn’t the Predator the one who should be invisible?

Aliens vs Predator: Last of His Clan

Gameboy – 1993

Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure

PC – 1995

I don’t know anything about this game, but I found this image.

Alien Trilogy

Playstation – 1996

Aliens Online

PC – 1998

Does it have elephantiasis?

Alien Resurection

Playstation – 2000

Aliens vs Predator: Extinction

Playstation 2 – 2003

Predator: Concrete Jungle

Playstation 2/XBOX – 2005

Aliens: Extermination

Arcade – 2006

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem

Playstation Portable – 2007

Alien: Infestation

Nintendo DS – 2011

Whilst the rest of the niche market for management sims are getting all bunched up about Cities Skyline I find myself back in the time sink that is my favourite management sim: Prison Architect. I’ve spoken about this one before, but every couple of months I head back into the game to find dozens of new features have been added and I have to relearn it from the start. When I first joined the Prison Architect community there was little to do but build cells and other basic facilities while prisoners pour in. Eventually you get bored and fire all the cooks until hunger turns the entire complex into a dystopian Battle Royale survival match. 

I’m not the only one who does that, right?

The nature of the game has changed somewhat. You’re no longer building a convict storage facility but given motivational rewards for getting prisoners paroled early. Many prisoners are not in a position to earn their parole and can be coached through to that point through running programs such as drug rehab, AA, foundation school courses, workshop safety courses and psychology sessions. This requires plenty of forethought and planning, while deciding what will be your priority. Some grants will allow you to focus your efforts on education or rooming to earn a cash bonus to expand your grounds.

Not that the game is all about second chances…there’s the day to day running of the prison. Everyone must be fed, kept secure and kept safe. When the rules are broken and contraband is found or a fight breaks out prisoners face lockdown or a stint in solitary. Prisoners in solitary can be recruited as confidential informants you can supply information on escape tunnels and hidden items around the prison. Using the CI’s put them at risk of getting a shanking though, so you’re constantly on your toes.

Many problems can be solved by keeping the population happy with good facilities, family visits, treatment and the like. On the other hand you’ll be upgrading your guards through training to carry stun guns and bring in sniffer dogs to keep things in line. There’s an endless list of jobs to be done, which is why it’s easy to lose time playing.

If you haven’t checked this game out yet, head to Steam or their homepage to donate and keep the ball rolling because it’s getting better and better. 

Do you know what comes out in a week? Batman: Arkham Knight, the third part in Rocksteady’s awesome trilogy of games! These story driven, action and stealth masterpieces rank among the best games ever made, and they all started with Batman trapped inside the infamous Arkham Asylum with some of his most dangerous enemies. What we saw in the game was a deranged, gothic madhouse that looked terrifying even before the Joker took charge. How does that depiction measure up to the version in the comics and other media? And where did the concept come from? Today we’re following on our quick and easy guides to Cthulhu, Ultron, and Doctor Who with a look inside this nuthouse.

In a Sentence: The fictional locale where Batman’s more insane foes are locked up for rehabilitation after being apprehended.

The Backstory

First of all, let’s take a look at this photograph:

You might be thinking “hey, that looks like a real life Arkham Asylum!”, and you’d be right. That is Danvers State Hospital, previously known as Danvers Lunatic Asylum and it has served as the real world inspiration for Arkham. Not for the Batman writers though…for H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft, who you may remember from our piece of The Cthulhu mythos, is the reigning king of unsettling, disturbing story telling. It is widely assumed (though not confirmed) that Danvers State Hospital was the real world inspiration of the Arkham sanatorium referenced in his stories ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘Pickman’s Model’. There’s plenty to support this assumption, such as the hospital being located in Massachusetts – the setting for most of Lovecraft’s stories – it’s gothic influenced architecture, it’s sprawling size and disturbing history.

There’s more to Danvers than an imposing facade. Build to be self-sustaining the grounds are riddled with underground tunnels. Experimental approaches to patient care was common, with mechanical restraints deemed harmful leaving hundreds of inmates to wander the corridors freely. The initial facility housed 500 patients with another 100 kept in the attic, and it expanded as time went on. A clinical school was added, seeing an influx of mentally ill children joining the population. Danvers became known for inhumane practises of shock therapy to help manage the inmates, as well as accounts of lobotomies, straight jackets and radical drug therapies. When these practises came to light and brought to heel in the 1960s the population of the hospital decreased and it eventually shut down.

If that sounds like the quintessential horror movie setting, it is. The disused and deteriorating asylum became the source of many rumours and stories in the local area. It was even used as the setting in the novel Project 17 and the movie Session 9.

‘Session 9′

Much of the legend surrounding Danvers, and it’s descriptions in the works of Lovercraft, have formed the inspiration for the Arkham Asylum that was introduced by Dennis O’Neil and Irv Novick in Batman #258 (1974) under the name ‘Arkham Hospital’. Comic continuity being what it is, the name initially shifted from Arkham Hospital to Sanatorium to Asylum back and forth before settling on the latter. It’s location has also been inconsistent, with it being described as ‘deep in the Gotham suburbs’, on the outskirts of the city, on a peninsula outside Gotham to being isolated on a small island accessed by a road bridge. Some of these inconsistencies, and it’s changing appearance, can be accredited to the number of times it’s been destroyed and rebuilt over the decades.

Bane destroyed a large section of the asylum at the beginning of the Knightfall story in order to push Batman’s limits as he attempted to recapture the many escapees. The entire facility was destroyed and rebuilt by Jeremiah Arkham, the founder’s nephew, who wanted to make it a modern facility modelled after the legend of the labyrinth on Minos (obviously). The place was emptied during the events of No Man’s Land, where the Warden Dr. Arkham elected to free his charges rather than watch them starve. Afterwards, Dr. Arkham re-established the hospital but, in the traditional of the Arkham family, had some problems of his own and took on the guise of the new Black Mask before burning the place down during Battle for the Cowl.

The history of the facility carries with it quite the insane streak. Founder Amadeus Arkham lived with a mentally unwell mother who he eventually euthanised (although it was made to appear as suicide). After establishing the hospital his family was murdered by a serial killer dubbed ‘Mad Dog’. When Mad Dog was incarcerated at the asylum, Arkham treated him personally until, months later, Mad Dog would be ‘accidentally’ electrocuted during routine electro-shock therapy. Arkham would descend into madness, satanism and cannibalism until he became an inmate in his own hospital. Insanity would continue to prey on the staff of Arkham Asylum with Jeremiah Arkham, Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Dr. Jonathan Crane, Dr. Hugo Strange and Lyle Bolton falling into this curse.

Why is it So Popular?

It’s certainly not hard to see why Arkham Asylum has struck a chord with readers. Scary mental institutions have been a popular trope in horror for a long time, and Batman has been pushing the darker themes for the past few decades. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Arkham and it’s back story were fleshed out, and this was a time when comics in general were taking on a darker tone. It’s become the perfect setting for stories of intrigue, murder, insanity and the supernatural.

Narratively the setting has worked perfectly for writers. It fills in the gaps in what happens to the villains Batman rounds up, gives them a place where the more colourful characters can interact, and gives the story a consistent setting to return to when needed.

Arkham has been most popular when used for psychological horror. A Serious House on a Serious Earth was an early example of this, with Dave McKean’s art adding an extra layer of lunacy to the locale. This concept was given a more realistic grounding in the Batman: Arkham Asylum video game where, like the graphic novel, Batman is lured into the institution by the Joker and run through a gauntlet of challenges. Living Hell gives us multiple viewpoints, but of note is Warren White, charged with fraud and faking an insanity plea for a cushier prison term he finds himself caught in Arkham’s madness. The Last Arkham sees Batman himself committed in order to find evidence that Victor Zsasz has been escaping to commit murderers, only to find his own sanity on the line.

Basically, this is a perfect setting for further antics of Batman’s line up of looneys. It’s little wonder why it is frequently revisited for deeper explorations into character’s psyches and challenging the effectiveness of Batman’s crusade against crime.

The Legacy

Aside from the Batcave it’s difficult to name a more widely known locale from the Batman universe. Even the prison for the less barmy villains – Blackgate Prison – is little known outside of regular readers. It’s not only a regular feature in the comics and it’s spin-offs, but it crops up in many other media and merchandise. The most obvious impact on the franchise is the number of graphic novels and mini-series centred on the asylum, essentially giving it a character unto itself.

Although Arkham Asylum was introduced in the after the 1960s TV series (which is a genuine shame), it has made the occasional appearance in other films. It was briefly visited in the Joel Schumacher films, with Jim Carrey’s Riddler locked up at the end of Batman Forever.

In Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins Dr Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) is an administrator of the hospital and later a patient.

Animated movies have TV shows have made good use of the setting as well, with Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, The Batman and Batman: The Brave and the Bold all making use of it. Assault on Arkham spins off from the video game series to depict the ‘Suicide Squad’ leading an incursion into the hospital.

The most recent depiction of Arkham on the screen comes from the live action series Gotham, which featured a story arc concerning a young Gordon during a stint in the security detail.

Outside of the frequently mentioned game series by Rocksteady, there’s been surprising few appearances of Arkham Asylum in the steady stream of video games based off the dark knight’s exploits. Batman Forever, Rose of Shin Tzu and Lego Batman series did squeeze it in a few times.

Due to the darker implications of this particular facet of the Batman universe, we don’t see much of Arkham Asylum in the toy shops…that’s with the amazing exception of some Lego sets!

Arkham Asylum has become a household name in recent years, and it’s role in the comics and other media is unlikely to come to an end.

How to Piss of the Fans: What’s the point of locking them up? Why doesn’t Batman just kill them?

Is it Worth Checking Out?: If you want to delve into Batman comics then it’s pretty unavoidable. If not, some of the stand alone stories, especially A Serious House on a Serious Earth and Living Hell are absolutely worth the read. If you’re a gamer and you haven’t played the Arkham Asylum/City series, then you should get onto that (Origins if you don’t mind a lesser quality and glitchy product). 

Hopefully we’ll have an Arkham Knight review up very soon!

We try and avoid mobile games that come with in-game purchases, but this one gets a pass because it hasn’t been designed around trying to squeeze extra dollars out of the players pocket, and carries with it a solid brand.

Bethesda Studios is well known for it’s detailed, expansive fictional worlds. The fantasy setting of The Elder Scrolls is good, but it’s Fallout’s wasteland that stands out as genuinely creative. Set in a world where the bombs fell during the Cold War of the 50s, and most of the human race fled into underground ‘vaults’ to survive. In the well known role playing games you often play a vault-dweller exploring the wide world for first time. Swarming with survivors, mutants and other dangers, it’s a rough time. Life in the Vaults are hardly easy living though.

In this new perspective on the franchise you play the role of an Overseer in a Vault at the beginning of the apocalypse. You have people turning up at your door and you must put them to work to maintain the isolated society. The bulk of the game follows a pattern of managing resources, building a population, fending off intruders and keeping everyone happy. As you draw in more survivors (or breed some) you unlock more rooms that provide resources and skills for the people.

Completing challenges can unlock more bottle caps and lunch-boxes of bonus goodies, including weapons and armour. These comes in handy when Radroaches or Raiders get into the Vault and need to be taken down. The only other way to obtain such items is to explore the wasteland, a largely uninteractive mechanic where your Vault Dwellers are sent out to try and salvage items of note. You can track their activities and call them back when needed but beyond choosing who to send there’s little involvement with this aspect of the game. You’d need to be cautious about sending out to many people, as it could leave your home undefended.

The only other decision left to be made is when to ‘rush’ production of a resource. This helps stave off problems from running out of power, food or fresh water but comes with the risk of starting a fire of getting infested with Radraoches. Without these basics the whole system can collapse as you are left unable to produce RadAway to keep your people healthy, so it’s often a risk that you’ll need to take.

Presentation wise the game is hit and miss. The graphics are lovely, and the 3D rooms are imaginatively done giving a strong sense of space. The characters modelled after the Fallout logo are charming enough even if they have only a limited range of facial features and the large headed children are a bit creepy. The only major downsides is the oft repeated snatches of music that accompany most menus begin to grate after a while, and the whole game really chews up the battery (we played on an iPhone 6+). Don’t plan on playing if you’re expecting an important call.

If this is the genre of game you like to pass the time with, Fallout Shelter is one of the better options available. Although the option to purchase better bonuses is present it doesn’t constantly try to milk it like Tiny Tower or withhold the best items like the deplorable The Simpsons: Tapped Out. If this isn’t your type of game then it will likely only hold your attention for a short time. It’s free to download, so you’ve got nothing to lose by trying it out.

Ah, the mid-year marking and reporting nightmare is at an end! That means this is the last delve into docos for the time being. We’ve already covered Nerd Culture, Porn, Internet Makers and the business of Love, Sex and Immigration,  now we’re going to merge bits of all of them together for video games. Except porn. There’s no porn here. Sorry. Today we’re going to go into video game history with Game Over and look at the modern trends with Indie Game: The Movie.

The saga of E.T.: The Video Game and it’s link to the Great Video Game Crash of 1983 is an integral part of gaming lore. To put things in context, video games are the biggest entertainment industry in the world, with GTAV being the biggest selling media product in history. All of it almost died in 1983. Atari had smashed the market with it’s innovative interchangeable cartridge system (seems like a no brainer). People loved being able to get multiple games with one console, but Atari had little to no quality control, or even cared much about the content. Excitement was winding down and the biggest selling game in the world, the first game available for pre-order, was being returned to stores by unhappy customers en masse. E.T.: The Video Game was not well received and is now considered one of the worst games of all time if not due to the quality of the game but what it came to symbolise.

Atari Game Over gives us a good history of the video game industry up until the point of the crash, and for modern viewers it is fascinating to look back and see the pioneers of what would come to be one of the profitable and widely embraced forms of entertainment in the world. These were the guys building it from scratch, and there are parallels with other visionary tales such as The Social Network, the story of Mark Zuckerberg. We get a lot of important figures in front of the camera to recount their own stories and comment on what happened, the most significant being E.T. game designer Howard Scott Warshaw giving his side of the story. He does get some redemption in that regard, pointing out that Spielberg had played it and approved it and the company was 100% behind the release.

The framing device for the movie is the investigation into the fabled landfill containing all the disposed off E.T. cartridges. This has some fun moments as they go through some impressive detective work trying to find the location and depth that they’ll have to go through. It can be hard to get invested though, as they seem to expect us to with the crowd of onlookers arriving to witness this ‘historic’ event. Ultimately they hype it up to be more than what it is…maybe you had to be there. ‘Ready Player One’ author Ernest Cline provides one of the most entertainingly geeky moments by flying into the area, retrieving his Delorean from ‘Game of Thrones’ author George R.R. Martin and driving to the site with a full size E.T.. It’s a delightfully geeky moment that you couldn’t dream up.

It’s a highly informative film with some good history that will be of interest to gamers and curious parties alike. The big moment of finding the Atari dumping ground is a bit blown out of proportion, but it’s a fun adventure.

Rating: SEVEN out of TEN

Bringing things round to the current state of affairs is Indie Game: The Movie, a well received and popular look at the development of three games. In hindsight we know that Braid, Fez and Super Meat Boy were all massive successes and a peek behind the scenes is welcome.

What becomes immediately apparent is that home made games are all very personal projects, reflecting the personalities of those who created them. Jonathan Blow is very much the upper class of the indie gamer community, living comfortably and paying the costs of the game out of his own pocket, creates an artistic, dreamy game designed for intellectual discussion. Phil Fish (best known now for one of the most hostile creator/consumer relationships ever) is a hipster type whose game features a character who can see the world in an enlightened manner thanks to his retro fashion choices. The team of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes are the grungy, metal, horror fans who gave us the hilariously gruesome, simple yet brilliant platformer that relies not on gimmicks for good solid game play.

As a gamer, I’ve played and very much enjoyed all of these games and they couldn’t find better representatives for the field of indie games. They all demonstrate the massive sacrifices they all make in order to pursue their dreams of building these games. Money, family and social lives all disappear in the face of this passion to create interactive art. What makes this film successful is the degree to which they create an emotional investment from the viewer, making us feel for these people even when they’re acting…eccentric. During the film we see some of Fish’s now famous temperamental reactions to public comments and Blow’s odd habit of responding to every single article about his game suggesting that people don’t quite get how amazing his game really is.

it’s the Super Meat Boy team who really make this an heartfelt film. Their childhood struggles, their inability to fit in, really forms a powerful backstory and it makes their redemption at the end of the movie all the more sweeter. While Braid and Fez are left a bit ambiguous, Super Meat Boy gives the film a strong and uplifting finale (and then they went on to make Binding of Isaac, a dark and awesome game that I love). 

Rating: NINE out of TEN

Even if you only occasionally dip into modern board games, you’re likely to have seen Love Letter. The wonderfully concise card game involves luck, bluffing and memory, is easily stored in its little pouch and is quick enough to work as a buffer between longer games. It’s one of the best new card games of recent years. Now we’ve got two new versions to choose from – a Batman edition and a Hobbit edition.

We went with Batman for obvious reasons.

When playing Love Letter you have one card in your hand. This represents the character holding your letter for the princess. The higher up the chain the more points the card is worth, the Princess herself being worth the most at 8 points. On your turn you draw a second card and decide which one to play. The card you play has an immediate effect depending on the character. Some let you sneak a look at another players card, eliminate another player by guessing their card or comparing them to see who has the most points, swapping hands and so forth. The last player standing or the one with the highest value card when the draw deck is depleted wins the round with the first to 4 winning the game.

Obviously holding the Princess is desirable…but if you are forced into playing it you’re eliminated. Lower scoring cards are the most useful in eliminating other players and are easier to hang on to creating a great balance. It’s a quick, fun game that anyone can compete in regardless of experience.

You may be wondering how the scenario translate to the comic world of Batman – delivering love letters to the Dark Knight seems a touch out of character. The switch up is pretty imaginative. Now holding a character represents the villain you’ve caught, with the Joker being the most valuable. Batman replaces the Guard card (valued at 1 point) who can guess what card another player is holding and Robin fills in for the Handmaiden you protects your hand.

Rather than being the first to 4 (or more depending on the players) tokens you’re now tasked with collecting 7 to win. The balance to this is a bonus token being scored when you use the Batman card to correctly guess a villain card. For experienced Love Letter players this results in a rethinking of strategy. Handmaiden tends to be the first card guessed by players using the Guard, but as the equivalent Robin doesn’t score a token it’s less likely to be guessed. This means the game will be interesting to new-comers and veterans alike. 

The best aesthetic change up is in the tokens. Rather than plain red cubes the tokens are yellow and black ovals printed with the early 90s Batman logo. The cards themselves are fine, but it’s a little disappointing that the art for each character is sourced from a different comic. It would have been better to have original art for the set. The artwork on Love Letter is pretty damn good…it would’ve been awesome to see that artists take on the familiar Batman characters.

If you haven’t got a copy of Love Letter this is a good version to pick up. It’s not offering much new if you already have one, although if your set is like mine and worn down it’s cheap enough to grab a replacement.

Batman: Arkham Knight is a massive game. The sandbox is big and detailed, with dozens upon dozens of individually designed buildings. The designers have embraced the opportunity to pack it full of easter eggs referencing Batman comics and the wider DC universe. Now that Rocksteady have finished their trilogy of top shelf Batman games people have speculated about where they might go next. Maybe some of these Easter Eggs could be the launching point…

And there’s spoilers. You are warned.

10. Victor Zsasz

So when you’re reviewing the the surveillance footage outside of the Clock Tower following the abduction of Oracle, wind the footage round back to the very beginning of the tape. Now keep an eye in the bottom corner to see Zsasz lurking about. After taking out Zsasz in Asylum and City I can see why Gotham’s deadliest serial killer didn’t make the line-up of villains again, but the completist in me hates that there’s a bad guy out there Batman didn’t round up! We know he’s active because one of the Riddler trophies is a Zsasz murder site!

This could become a DLC pack, maybe one for Nightwing. Whilst Batman is hunting Scarecrow and everyone else, Nightwing can pitch in by hunting Zsasz. Maybe tie it in with his search for the Penguin arms cache.

9./8. – Constantine and Zatanna

Around the city there are many buildings that belong to people from the DC universe, including Zatanna’s Magic Shop and John Constantine’s Paranormal Investigators. The former is a powerful magic user who doesn’t get enough love by fans, and we’d love to see her with a stand alone adventure. The latter is getting more exposure, and his hunt for demons would look great within the art style of the Arkham games. Why have we paired them up? Because having them cross over would be even more awesome than either of them on their own. They’d have a really interesting dynamic and the worlds of magic and the supernatural could have some cool overlap. Maybe even go to war with other!

7. Calendar Man

At the end of the game, once you’ve activated the Knightfall Protocol, we cut to a crowd of reporters outside of Wayne Manor and amongst them you can catch a glimpse of Julian Day aka Calendar Man from the back. He’s distinguished by having the names of the months tattooed around this bald head. Although Day has been present throughout the series he’s never been an active character (although he is the basis of an exceptionally complicated achievement in Arkham City).

Now we know he’s on the prowl at the end of the Arkham Knight story we could get a DLC with a member of the Bat family (Drake, Grayson, Todd, etc.) taking up the cowl and hunting Calendar Man who is committing date themed murders throughout the city. It’ll disrupt the ambiguous epilogue but still be interesting. Using Todd would be most interesting, adding a bit more to the redemption part of his arc that is only slightly touched on.

6. Birds of Prey

Is it just me, or did female characters get unintentionally sidelined in Arkham Knight? Oracle gets kidnapped and has to be rescued, Catwoman gets kidnapped and has to rescued, Poison Ivy gets captured without a fight and Harley Quinn – listed as a main character of the series – gets taken down by essentially being tripped up for the third game in a row! It isn’t until the Batgirl DLC that Harley finally gets to put up a fight!

Some of the computer screens in Oracle’s Clock Tower do show a Birds of Prey logo…maybe we can get an entirely female centric team headlining a new game? Get the Birds of Prey, lead by Oracle, on their own mission. Players can switch between the team members like Black Canary, Huntress, Lady Blackhawk, and combine them in combat, just like in Arkham Knight. Keeping the neo-noir setting and the combat mechanics of the Arkham series you’ve got an awesome Birds of Prey game.

5. The GCPD

There’s heaps of cool stuff in the GCPD headquarters in Arkham Knight, especially in the evidence lock-up. There’s also a shift list board featuring Montoya, Bullock and John Jones (a reference to Martian Manhunter). We’ve made no secret of being massive fans of the ‘Gotham Central’ comic series, a book about the everyday folk working at Gotham’s Major Crimes unit who are tasked with investigating and bringing in the big name villains of the city.

To really mix things up, it’ll be interesting to get DLC set during the events of Arkham Knight where you play as some of these regular detectives trying to get their city under control. It could even take place between the prologue and main game, when Scarecrow has made his first strike and villains were starting to make moves in the city. Bullock and Montoya investigating Two-Face’s bank robberies would be cool.

4. Swamp Thing

During the later parts of the game you might overhear some enemies talking about a ‘swamp monster’ in Louisiana, and there’s a bench dedicated to Dr. Alec Holland (Swamp Thing’s human identity) in Ivy’s green house. The Swamp Thing is a character who has evolved in different ways over time, and represents some themes that don’t feature much in pop culture at the moment, such as environmentalism, the interconnected nature of the conscious and the mystical history of the region. Along with the Swamp Thing’s ability to inhabit and manipulate flora fauna, we could have an interesting basis for a new game.

3. The Grey Ghost

This is one of the easier spotted easter eggs in the game, but one of the more obscure references. In a few locations, most notably the Clock Tower, is a poster for ‘The Ghost in Grey’, a character who appears in one episode of Batman: The Animated Series. The Grey Ghost is a TV show about a vigilante that inspired Bruce Wayne to create Batman. In the episode a villain is recreating crimes from ‘The Grey Ghost’ and Batman seeks out the original actor (voiced by Adam West) to help solve the crime.

This could be a fantastic bit of DLC – casting the player as The Grey Ghost in a black and white, Art Deco setting using retro gadgets to catch some classic villains and gangsters. It could be framed as a young Bruce Wayne watching the adventure play out on TV. Getting Adam West in to voice the character would be extra awesome!

2. Superman

This has been mentioned by a number of sources already, but it’s pretty prominent. There’s a Lex Corp skyscraper, a number of references to Superman in the enemies audio and, most tellingly, a voice mail message from Lex Luthor on Bruce Wayne’s phone in his office. So clearly this is a universe that Superman exists in.

With Dawn of Justice coming out next year there will obviously be a video game tie-in. With their well thought out approach to Batman, Rocksteady would be a good pick to put try their hand on a Superman game. Could they be the ones to make an actual good Superman game? Is such a thing possible?

1. Green Arrow

But I’m not a big Superman fan…I’m a Green Arrow fan. Rocksteady’s approach to Batman could be perfectly translated to a Green Arrow scenario. There are a number of references to Queen Consolidated in the Arkham City and Knight, including a skyscraper, Catwoman mentioning having stolen from Queen, most interesting, one of the Joker victims kept imprisoned by Batman being an important worker from Queen Consolidated. We’ve got the beginning of the story right there – Oliver Queen has had one of his key workers go missing and sets out to investigate.

And get Stephen Amell to voice him, because that man is delightful.

Swinging around the city, stalking enemies and using a range of trick arrows has massive scope for possibility. Using the bow and ropes to set up ways to traverse areas and solve puzzles would be cool as. If you give me a Rocksteady game where I can shoot people with the boxing glove arrow I will be a happy geek.

Here’s a simple game that I was introduced to over the weekend, immediately went out and bought and played dozens of times since. Each game lasts roughly ten minutes and usually involves a lot of yelling, which is just awesome. We’ve already got the ‘Daybreak’ expansion on the way so we can get larger groups into the game.

It’s likely that you’ve encountered this kind of game in the past as ‘Mafia’, ‘Wink Murder’ or ‘Werewolf’, or you’ve played a similar tabletop game like Resistance. Everyone gets a random character card, with 1 or 2 players being werewolves. It is up to the rest of the players to determine who the werewolves are whilst said monsters try and cast suspicion on the innocent villages. What sets this particular game apart is that there’s a range of character roles with different abilities and you only get one chance to catch the werewolves. Once everyone gets their characters and memorises them, the players close their eyes and each character takes it in turn to open their eyes and play out their ability. This is managed by an Announcer player who gives instructions, or with the free smart phone app that gives instructions on a timer and provides some ambient background music.

The role you draw can greatly vary your experience in play. The werewolves simply open their eyes and find out who is on their side, but the Robber swaps his card with another person and looks at what they have become. The Seer will take a peek at some cards round the table (or the three unused cards in the middle), the Troublemaker swaps other people’s cards and the Insomniac checks their card at the end of the night to see if it’s been changed. This means that when everyone opens their eyes to discuss who they think the werewolves are, each player brings a different bit of information that they may or may not share. Quite often people will want to hang off on sharing their information to see if someone slips up and gives themselves away. This few minutes of discussion involves clever deduction, lies, bluffs and accusations before all are called to vote by pointing at the suspected werewolf. The player is ‘lynched’ and if it’s a werewolf, the villagers win, otherwise the werewolves win!

It’s easy to learn, can host anywhere from 3 to 13 players with the base deck and has proven to be a lot of fun with a couple of different groups. Some of the characters can add an extra element of intrigue for more experienced players, beginning with the Minion who tries to take the fall for the werewolves, the suicidal Tanner who wants people to think he’s a werewolf and the extra muddling Doppelgänger, who copies the role of another player. 

For a quick, high energy fun and good hearted yelling this is a great buy. We’re looking forward to extra 11 roles with ‘Daybreak’ so we can increase the player count to 20!

“Mwahahahahahaha! and so forth.”

Let me start with a story. About a year ago I joined a local gaming collective called WABA (Western Australian Boardgaming Association) in order to meet like minded board gaming enthusiasts and try some new challenges. It’s a fantastic group of people and I always have a good time at the meets. But the first time I went there was something…disconcerting. I was happily involved in a game of Battlestar Galactica (as Adama, so say we all) when, a couple of tables over, one of the organisers of the meet stood up and announced loudly that ‘Deadly Bolt has KO’d six underlings!’ This was confusing to say the least. This giant of a man, substantially taller than my meagre 6’4″, had made this strange proclamation. Was this normal practise for this group, or was he simply very enthusiastic about his game? He did it again later, declaring that ‘Turbo Dude’ has disposed of a piece of litter. It continued like this for quite a while. It wasn’t until weeks later that I learned he was playing ‘Heroes Wanted’, a Kickstarter backed board game, and was acting out his characters ‘quirk’ to avoid losing points. I didn’t get playing ‘Heroes Wanted’ that day but it had piqued my interest. When the Kickstarter for the expansion pack ‘The Stuff Of Legend’ opened with the option to buy the base game and existing four expansions I got on board. And we’re happy to say that was worth the investment. The game goes like this: a member of the superhero squad The Champions of Zeta City has retired and they’re advertising for new heroes to join the team. As a new, up and coming champion you hit the streets with the intention of making a name for yourself. You pick one of four scenarios (six with ‘Stuff of Legends’) starting with rounding up super-villain loiterers and jaywalkers and work up to asylum break-outs and booby-trapped fun houses and work to earn the most Fame Points to become the winner. What strikes people initially is the mind-boggling number of superhero combinations you can have. You combine a Hero A card with a Hero B card (literally the top and bottom of the character) to create your unique character and with all the expansion packs there are hundreds of cards. The odds of winding up with the same character is beyond possibility. Every top half marks you as a Vigilante, Mutant, Cosmic, Tech, Magical or rare Mystic type of hero, determining their play style, and each top and bottom half gives you abilities and superpowers to use during the game. Although 4-6 scenarios may not sound like many the variations in hero types and powers keeps the replay-ability high. That’s not even counting the randomly chosen Headlines (unlockable goals for the play through), randomly selected Quirks that change player behaviour and huge variation in villains you will encounter. SO MANY. Once every player has their character and picked a Quirk – an action you have to perform at set points to score points such as saying ‘hashtag’ before every attack or giving the losing player a pep talk – and the scenario is set up you start the play. On each turn you play a card from you hand that represents your action from moving to attacking enemies to activating your superpower. You’ll fight your way through underlings and henchmen and take shots at the stronger super-villain while aiming to complete Headlines (random side goals) that unlock new abilities for your hero. After you’ve been round the table the villain makes a move, activates scenario specific events like setting off explosions, and then all enemies in range of heroes will strike. If you can’t defend, you get knocked out for the round. Gameplay is easy to pick up, layered enough for strategy to play an integral role and moves quickly round the table. It’s well balanced and the bright, fun approach to the material makes it easy for everyone to enjoy playing up their role. The game also looks great, having a newspaper aesthetic and design that is both creative and unique. The dramatic looking villain meeple is automatically one of our favourite playing pieces. The only quibble we have with the game is the set up time. It takes a while to sort out the piles of cards, place all the meeples on the board and sort out each player’s hero card. From opening the box to starting the game it takes just as long to put together as other RPG’s in a box like Firefly and Fortune and Glory, but with a much shorter play time. This isn’t the sort of quibble that will get in the way of enjoying the game though. In between the bright and colourful design, the goofy sense of humour, the involving game design, variation of play and the superhero theme this is already proving to be a household favourite. When you want something with a bit of role playing to it that won’t chew up the entire afternoon you won’t do much better than ‘Heroes Wanted’. Here’s looking forward to more scenarios in the future. Oh yeah – Action Phase Games, who created ‘Heroes Wanted’ – have two more games in the works. We’ve backed ‘Scoundrel Society’, which has already finished, but it’s not to late to get on board with ‘Ninja Camp’. Based on the premise and how much we’re liking ‘Heroes Wanted’ and the customer service (one of our boards arrived damaged and they immediately responded with a replacement), we’ve backed that one as well.

Needless to say, this isn’t the first tabletop game to employ an attention getting title. It’s evocative of the already popular ‘Kittens in a Blender’. Yet this game has become a pre-order smash hit after it’s massively successful Kickstarter campaign. For a modestly packaged card game, it raised close to an amazing US$9million through a record breaking 219,382 backers. This means that even you don’t have a copy you’ll likely know someone who does.

The game is simple to get going. Everyone starts with 5 cards, one of which being a ‘Defuse’ card, and the remaining cards are shuffled into the deck and placed in the middle of the table. Going round the table each player takes it in turn to play any number they want from their hand and then draw a new card. If that card is an ‘Exploding Kitten’ (a card picturing an explosion triggered by a cat doing normal cat things, like running across a keyboard) you must reveal it and, if possible, cancel it with a ‘Defuse’ card and place the Kitten back into the deck. If you can’t defuse, you’re out of the game. The last man standing wins. 

Other cards in the deck allow you to sneak a look at the upcoming cards, skip your turn, force other players to take extra turns, shuffle the deck, cancel cards and take cards from other players. There are a precious few ‘Defuse’ cards scattered through the deck, and it becomes imperative that you keep yourself in the game until you can get hold of them. It’s not all down to luck however, as knowing who is holding defuse cards and picking the right time to play your cards can be costly. Being able to choose where in the deck you replace a defused Kitten can result in some of the biggest dick moves in modern gaming, as dropping them straight onto the next player is entirely an option. 

One of the biggest selling points of the game, and a key factor in it’s massive campaign backing, is the artwork supplied by Matt Inman of theoatmeal.com. His brand of comedy and cartoons have been one of the best things about the modern internet and they elevate this from being a tightly crafted 15 minute game to comedy gold. Spec-Op Bunnies, All-Seeing Goat Wizards and Kitten Therapy provide much mirth and chuckles throughout play, and the NSFW expansion/stand-alone deck is even funnier. Cards describing tying a butterfly to your genitals and discovering a wizard living in your boobs are wonderfully odd. Extra additions like the magnetic case, personalised comic and the super special secret (can we talk about that yet?) make us feel like appreciated costumers.

So after all the waiting and the unexpectedly enormous Kickstarter campaign we can boil it down to one simple question: is it fun? Absolutely yes. With a single deck and up to five players the game goes quick and satisfying. Shuffling the standard deck and NSFW deck together and getting 9 players together doubles the run time but it’s still just as tense and fun. Starting everyone with a ‘Defuse’ card is a good move as it usually means everyone gets through the first half of the deck. As tension builds at play starts getting dirty, dropping a ‘Nope’ card on your opponents is damn good fun.

This addition to the PSN store has been garnering positive reviews and has a great title, which caught our attention. It also has been billed as a ‘spiritual successor’ to the game Dear Esther, which set off warning lights. Not wanting to offend those who enjoyed Dear Esther, but that thing was deathly boring. If you’re unfamiliar with Dear Esther, Gone Home or any of the similar ‘games’, they’re a form of interactive story telling and although they are sold as games I’m dropping scare quotes around ‘game’ because they have extremely limited interactive elements and lack many of the qualifying features of being a video game.

In most cases you control a nameless, faceless character in the first person as you follow a linear path through a location while an audio voice over tells a story. I can see the potential of tying a story to a visual environment that provides context, but these have proved fairly unexciting. Gone Home had a good story told in the style of dairy entries but no-one had anything to say about it a week after release, with it’s tackling of sexual identity issues being the only really notable aspect. We didn’t finish Dear Esther, feeling little to no connection with the material. The problem is that it offers aspects of a book and a video game without the benefit of being either. You can’t relax and enjoy the story because you’re steering the character through it, and there’s none of the challenge of playing a game.

That’s putting aside that some games have successfully told fantastic stories without paring down the gameplay elements. Bastion, Bioshock Infinite and Portal all crafted stories of complexity and nuance, with discussions about them continuing years after the release of the game, while delivering some of the best gameplay on the market. Portal has a minor merchandising empire and a legion of fans with a mute protagonist and a disembodied (at first) voice. With games of this nature it doesn’t feel like these interactive stories like Dear Esther aren’t giving us something we need.

Having said all that, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture might be the title to prove to be an exception if not the changing point. It’s not clear which character the player is controlling except they have an integral role to play in events that precede the game. We’ find ourselves in a quaint little English town where a series of strange occurrences have been recorded at the observatory, leading to sickness, quarantine and disappearances. As you walk about the locale you see events play out in sparkly ghost performances and it’s up the player to make sense of it all. There’s an intriguing mystery at the root of it all, but hopefully the game doesn’t try to explaining it all as the character responses to what happens is the real driving force. The story is divided up into a number of chapters that focus on different people beginning with the town pastor responding the emergency situation and his disagreements with some of the locals.

These character driven threads are the strength of the game. Having only played through the first of five chapters we’ve already found that it successfully creates an emotive experience. The final part of the chapter is heart breaking, seeing an established strong character reach his limit. It’s even more impressive that the game does this with characters represented as sparkling golden glow balls. The voice acting is on point, which really would have been a make or break aspect of the game.

The visuals are downright stunning. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture could be a technical demo for the Playstation 4, with stunningly realistic graphics which, along with the soundtrack, adds to the haunting, provocative atmosphere that works to involve the player. As patience is required to explore all the nooks and crannies of the town to find all the story prompts it’s nice to have something stellar to look at. The world is a simple one, but pausing every now and then to appreciate the details is worth doing.

Whether or not Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is worth picking up depends on whether a story driven treasure hunt is enough to compel you through it, but if you gaming sensibilities tend towards death matches it might not be worth your time. 

Oh joy, another retro style indie game with ridiculous difficulty and a quirky sense of humour. That’s not unlike a billion other titles on Steam at the moment. But it’s free on the Playstation Network so I’m going to give it a go. Everything starts of expected. There’s retro style pixel graphics and a catchy theme song with over-the-top attitude. There’s quirky humour oozing out of the opening cut scene. Then we get into the tutorial mode and find out about the games time travelling mechanic.

The characters are part of an elite force who travel through time fixing the things that have gone wrong in history, such as the dinosaurs getting wiped out by an asteroid. To achieve this they have to fight their way through bullet-hell platforming stages and at any time they can rewind time to bring in reenforcement’s. Essentially you can play through any part of the level alongside your previous play through with a different, or even the same, character. 

You only get a short amount of time to clear each stage so utilising this mechanic is essential, and it’s flexible enough for the player to get creative with it. If you’re facing a boss who has such a ridiculous amount of health that you can’t destroy it in the time frame you can attack it, rewind time and attack it alongside yourself and then repeat a dozen times until you’re fighting alongside 12 other versions of yourself. With a huge amount of characters to unlock, each with their own set of weapons and attacks, you can work your way past an obstacle using a combination of different attacks at the same time.

It’s insanely satisfying when you get to the end of a level and you get a replay of the level with all your characters and time looped attempts going at once. Over all it’s a satisfying game that is a bundle more fun than most of the retro-style indie games out there. Worth checking out.

I love Kickstarter’s gaming section. It’s created an amazing market for new board game developers and some of the best items on my shelf have come from crowd funding. The latest item to arrive at our doorstop comes from a developer in the wee city of Perth, Australia and is well worth your attention. Especially if your brain needs a workout.

This MENSA endorsed puzzler puts players in the shoes of an assistant working for a mad scientist. Sadly the scientists cogwheel based contraption is broken and you need to fix it before he returns. You begin by building a board out of random tiles, each depicting two parts of coloured cogs, and take three tiles for yourself. On your turn you swap a tile from your hand with one on the board with the intention of matching colours. Create a string of linked cog pieces of the same colour and you score points for each part. 

Simple mechanics, yes, which makes it easy to play. Winning, on the other hand, is a bit more taxing. You only get points for the modifications made to the board so half a tile might be worthless. Any time a closed circuit is made, or a string of pieces connect to the edges of the board at both ends, it forms a mechanism and cannot be altered again. This means options for gaining points shrinks as the game progresses, requiring forward planning.

One of the smartest aspects of the game is the scoring mechanic. Each player has their own score track with four score tokens representing the four colours in the game. You score points with blue, you only move the blue token up the track. At the end of the game the only score that counts is the lowest on your track. You have to plan every move in the game to ensure that you balance the colours you score points with because one left trailing will nullify the entire match.

Presentation wise COGZ is fantastic. The steampunk cogwheel design is very cool, and the Kickstarter campaign helped add nice cloth bag to store the pieces, a very funky round tracker and a book of variant games. It’s bright and colourful enough to stand out.

If you want something a bit more cerebral in your games cabinet that is accessible to everyone this is worth a look. Check it out here.

Or, if you’re feeling fancy, go for the giant Ludicrous COGZ edition!

This article is going to deal with the profession of voice acting, performers who provide voices for characters who do not have a real life, physical presence. We’re talking animation, motion capture, voice over and the like. When we draw a distinction between voice actors and actors we have to acknowledge that there’s many who have successfully worked in both fields, but for most of these examples we’re going to generalise and talk about those who work almost exclusively in one of the other.

With that little disclaimer out of the way, there’s been a trend in the past couple of decades to populate big name, big budget animated films with established Hollywood actors. This is not only passing over the more talented vocal performers in the industry today but doing the film itself a disservice. Let’s find an example: Hotel Transylvania. It’s a family friendly animated monster film that achieved only moderate reviews but was popular with kids. When you look at a picture of the cast you may notice something familiar about them…

…that being they’re all familiar to you. This is a group of people well known for their work in live action films and stand up comedy. Why have we cast this group of people in the place of actors who specialise in vocal work? Kevin James plays Frankenstein’s Monster, and if you listen to his performance without the visual you would have no idea what type of character he was playing. He does not alter his voice in the slightest to reflect the characters unique origins or his personality – it’s the same routine he does in every one of his movies. Ditto Adam Sandberg, David Spade, Selena Gomez, Fran Drescher, Molly Shannon and Jon Lovitz. The only one who does anything different is, surprisingly, Adam Sandler. He does his usual routine with a hokey accent. And then there’s a main character voiced by Cee Lo Green, who isn’t an actor.

This movie isn’t terrible. It’s cheesy and although the plot is thinner than diluted paint thinner it’s fun for the kids. But the actors drag it down. Compare this to the cast of Futurama, seen here doing a live reading at Oz Comic Con.

That’s a rather modest, small group of people. You may notice something strange about the number, because this is the main cast of the show.

This cast is not only a very talented and attractive team, but amazingly versatile in what they can achieve. Billy West, on the far right of the group picture, voices four of those main characters.

These four.

Fry, the Professor, Zoidberg and Zapp Brannigan. Four completely different characters, each with a completely unique voice. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who identified that all four of these characters were voiced by the same person. West is talented enough to switch between them on the fly – I’ve seen him do it in person. No warm ups, no pauses to get into character. It was amazing. If you listened to any one of these characters without the visual you’d have a pretty good idea of what type of character they were. Compare this to Kevin James as the Monster – you couldn’t hang a single trait on that character’s voice beyond ‘Kevin Jamesish’.

An insult in many cultures.

You’d think that the first choice for major animated movies would be the vocal talents like West, Tara Strong, Troy Baker, Jennifer Hale, Nolan North and Richard Horvitz and more, but Disney and Dreamworks rarely cast them in anything other than supporting and background characters. Instead they get most of their work in television and video games.

This wasn’t the case prior to the 90’s, but Disney picked Robin Williams for the role of the Genie in Aladdin. This was genius, especially as they gave Williams and long leash and animated around his lines. His comedic talents were perfectly complimented by Disney’s animators and a big part of the reason the movie is considered a classic.

William’s participation was a boon for the marketing department, because they now had a beloved and well known actor to hang the film on. This eventually led to a conflict between the actor and the studio as they disregarded his actor’s wishes to be treated on the same level as the rest of the cast. Disney put out The Lion King two years later and packed it with more familiar names like Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons, Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin, Rowen Atkinson and Nathan Lane.

If Disney laid the path for this trend, Dreamworks sprinted down it. Their first major release, Antz, was heavily marketed for it’s voice cast of Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Jennifer Lopez, Sylvester Stallone and Gene Hackman playing thinly veiled versions of themselves. This is a clear example of marketing needs driving the artistic process behind the film. By the time we reached movies like Shark Tale and Madagascar the characters we animal versions of the actor’s public personas. 

Guess which one is voiced by Angelina Jolie.

Remember Shark Tale? If you don’t it’s not because it’s lame (although it is), it’s because it’s lazy. Will Smith playing a sassy underdog, James Gandolfini playing a gangster boss type, Jack Black playing a chubby loser – it’s the roles the public identify the actors with. Every major decision for this movie was made by the marketers right down to it’s release coinciding with the release of Finding Nemo. The writers and directors just joined the dots.

This is why we ended up with Selena Gomez voicing a teenaged angst ridden vampire with all the energy of a deflating tire. It was a marketing move instead of getting someone who could go to town on the role. Like Tara Strong. She’s an amazing voice actor. Here’s a couple of roles you have heard her in:

Tara Strong has provided voices for hundred and hundreds of characters in the past 25 years. She’s played more superheroes than Chris Evans. In addition to Harley and Raven above she’s played X-23, Batgirl, Squirrel Girl, Scarlet Witch, Blink, Invisible Woman and more. Hell, she’s even played Selena Gomez in Robot Chicken.

I don’t want to disregard some of the great actors who walk the line between live action and voice actors, or the actors who have pushed themselves to create amazing characters when restricted to their voice to deliver the role. Mark Hamill is my favourite version of the Joker bar none. But I do want to see the community of amazing voice actors get their dues in the business and not be given background roles to more marketable names. Let’s hear it for the voices. 

Microsoft is rolling out Backwards Compatibility for the XBOX One today, and the list of games is rather underwhelming. It is also a rather confusing list, considering for the past six months Microsoft has been running a poll figuring out which games the playerbase actually is interested in playing.

At the top of that list is Call Of Duty: Black Ops II with 113,455 votes as of today. That game is nowhere to be found on the current list of titles available today. In fact, of the top 20 games voted on, only three of them made the cut. Gears Of War 2 and 3, and Fallout 3 are all available starting today. A handful of other titles are confirmed as being “in process”, but the bulk are being ignored.

The backwards compatibility list is so bizarrely chosen, that it begs the question of how the games were even chosen in the first place. Here’s how the titles rank based on their standings in the polls:

#7- Fallout 3

#9- Gears Of War 3

#19- Gears Of War 2

#23- Assassins Creed II

#34- South Park: Stick of Truth

#35- Borderlands

#36- Gears Of War

#42- Gears Of War: Judgment

#52- Mass Effect

#56- Fable 2

#60- Just Cause 2

#65- Mirrors Edge

#84- Castle Crashers

#98- LEGO Star Wars

#104- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2

#116- Doom

#132- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas

#152- Plants Vs Zombies

#160- Shadow Complex

#192- Beyond Good and Evil HD

#217- Doom 2

#226- Sonic The Hedgehog

#227- Condemned

#241- Prince Of Persia

#249- Dirt 3

#250- Halo Spartan Assault

#251- LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean

#263- Sonic The Hedgehog 2

#284- Sonic The Hedgehog 3

#289- Sonic CD

That means there are only 30 titles of the 104 titles released that were in the Top 300 most voted on games. That’s actually insulting. Why even bother with a poll if you’re just going to pick the games you feel like releasing?

Mutant Blobs Attack made the list with only 123 votes. It’s on page 76 of 78 pages of XBOX titles. Somehow, those 123 votes were enough to get someone to spend the time to make the game backwards compatible, despite the fact that it had 113,332 less votes than Call Of Duty: Black Ops II.

This update isn’t about fans at all, or gamers. What once had fans excited has turned into a very underwhelming event. Gamers have waited months for backwards compatibility, campaigning for their favorite titles, only to be told that their votes don’t matter. That their campaigns don’t matter. That no matter what you do, a game with over 100K votes is going to lose its spot to a game with 123 votes.

In fact, Backwards Compatibility is really just a way to try and turn poor selling garbage games into gold. With a limited list to choose from, it’s possible someone might actually drift over to Mutant Blobs Attack and purchase it, a feat that would have seemed impossible months ago. And it’s not just Mutant Blobs Attack…

Putty Squad has 121 votes. Bellator: MMA Onslaught has 139 votes. Ugly Americans has 161 votes. Blood Of the Werewolf has 156 votes.

Microsoft and these publishers are hoping you’ll give their failed titles a second glance. Microsoft doesn’t care if their gamers are happy. They care if the publishers are happy.

So to all the Gears Of War fans out there, congratulations on being the lucky group that got what they wanted today. To all the Call Of Duty, Battlefield, Red Dead, Skyrim, Left For Dead, and Halo fans. It sucks to be you.

Oh, hey…a board game based on a video game. That totally sounds like a worthwhile investment. Kinda like replacing a Blu-Ray with a VHS.

On the other hand, I’ve long loved the XCOM game series and have been playing them since the original came out in 1994. It’s also produced by Fantasy Flight who have a knack for capturing the feel of their source material. Their tabletop adaptations of Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones are praised for their ability to put the players in the mindset of the characters they take on. So let’s grab XCOM and give it a whirl. Let’s also download the free app, because the game doesn’t work without it. We’ll explain that in a moment.

For those not familiar, XCOM the video game series positions you as the commander of an international military and R&D organisation called ‘X-COM’, assembled and tasked with the sole of purpose of defending Earth from the aliens who have been launching attacks around the globe. You manage your resources, research and develop new equipment based on alien technology recovered from battles and run the show during combat missions. The board game takes the same approach but with a co-op angle. Each one of the (up to) four players is in charge of a different area of the XCOM organisation – Commander, Chief Scientist, Squad Leader and Central Officer.

What immediately separates this out from other co-op games like Pandemic and Shadows Over Camelot is the degree of specification each role has. Rather than the usual arrangement – each player having the same actions but with one special move – there’s practically no overlap in each persons goals and abilities. The Commander deploys the Interceptor jets to take down UFOs, chooses which Crisis will effect the team and makes sure you don’t exceed the budget. Chief Scientist chooses new technology cards to research and assigns scientists to the task. Squad Commander assigns soldiers of different types to missions and base defence. The Central Officer deploys satellites into orbit and communicates instructions from the app. Everyone has an equally important role to play, with the Chief Scientist needing to keep track of available upgrades that will be essential to winning the game, while the Squad Leader has to makes the right call on which soldier to place where to avoid casualties and defend the world, while the Commander prevents them both from over-spending in one area causing problems elsewhere.

Every round of play goes through the Timed Phase and then the Resolution Phase. The Timed Phase essentially sets the board for the second half where results are determined. Tasks are relayed one at a time from the app on a phone, tablet, etc., and given to the rest of the team by the Central Officer. Whether it’s deploying troops, picking a research focus, placing invading UFOs or collecting the budget you’ve got a limited amount of time to make your decision – usually about 10 seconds – before the game moves on. Once everything is set up the non-timed resolution phase allows players to complete missions, build technologies and everything else through dice rolls. You can keep rolling as long as you have units on the task, but every roll raises the threat level. It becomes a push-your-luck mechanic where the odds increasingly stack against you and you’re more likely to lose your assets. At the end of the round you input data about the global state of panic and damage done and it sets up the next round.

The app sounds like an odd inclusion at first. One might be hesitant to invest in a game that requires an app to function, or see it as a gimmick. Some board game do have apps to complement gameplay or add new features, but this game straight up does not work without it. That said, it’s extremely well integrated and very easy to use, never feeling like an intrusion. Having the randomised factors is a huge plus, and it streamlines the complex gameplay so that new players can pick it up quickly. The timer gives the game a level of tension few board games can achieve and the soundtrack and design add atmosphere to the play session. The only problem we’ve encountered was on the iPhone6+, when it would skip over some steps and wouldn’t backtrack. We had no problems with the iPad or iPad Mini. 

Another massive plus for the game is the removal of the co-op game Alpha player – that asshole who always takes charge of the game and begins dictating what everyone else should do because they’re convinced they’re the only one who can win it. Anyone who’s played a co-op has encountered this, the person who doesn’t grasp that a co-op game involves everyone playing it the way they want towards a common goal (I used to play with someone who’d reach over and take other people’s cards and play them). Everyone is so specialised and working on such a short timer that you only get enough time to offer brief advice and share ideas before a decision has to be made. It’s a co-op game that genuinely makes you feel like a team of individuals contributing to a whole.

It’s a fantastically presented game that perfectly captures the feeling and the tone of the source material. The board looks indecipherable at first but it’s designed so each unique role has their own space, and that makes sense. It’s complex without being fiddling and challenging without being frustrating. We’ve got about a 50% win rate and it randomises the game each time, so we’re looking forward to more plays. We’ve also tried some solo games, but the amount of information to manage makes it very difficult for anyone other than a seasoned player to play effectively. If you want a really good entry into the co-op gaming genre than put this on your wishlist.