I’ve played to about halfway through the Egypt episode now, and I’m afraid I’ll have to be a dick and disagree with Mrs. Gibson’s rather controversial statements such as

As for the Wii version… I never thought it would come to this, but here we are: I’d rather play Angel of Darkness.

or

The shooting in TRA Wii just doesn’t work. The remote is ridiculously sensitive; the blue dot on the screen jiggles nervously even when your hand is absolutely still.

I’ll have to agree on the point that the cursor does jiggle a fair lot – however, for all I can tell the wiimote is no more sensitive than in any other game. The difference, and a very noticable one at first, is that the cursor movement isn’t “smoothed out”. You know what I mean – most Wii games smooth the movement of the cursor to prevent the “jiggling” that Ellie describes. TRA doesn’t, which feels weird at first, but I’ve actually come to like it, possibly even better than the heavy smoothing most Wii games (Mario Galaxy, for example) apply – if only because the cursor doesn’t feel “laggy” this way.

Either way, I honestly don’t see where this causes problems with the game, since there is a rather heavy aiming assistance for everything involving the cursor. If you lock on to an enemy or target, the camera will (usually) keep them on the screen, leaving you with the task of dodging their attacks and pointing the cursor within a rough 10cm distance of them so you can hit them. The same holds true for shooting targets, with the exception that those don’t move around.

Now I haven’t played the 360 or PS2 versions of TRA, but I have honestly not had any problems at all with the controls in the Wii version. Nor the camera, for that matter – the camera can be turned with the cursor when holding C (the upper nunchuck button). Much like the lack of cursor smoothing, this feels a bit odd at first but works surprisingly well, giving you full control over the camera on a console that doesn’t have a secondary analog stick to control it with. Moreover, if you hold C and Z on the nunchuck, you get freelook AND target highlighting, which is excellent for scanning your surroundings for stuff to shoot. Aside from enemies sometimes passing behind objects and the camera not turning quite fast enough to keep up with them when they run past you, I have yet to experience any of the camera issues described in the Eurogamer review. Much like in Legend, the camera pretty much always helpfully turns to show you where you’re supposed to go next.

They ruined [the T-Rex battle] in the first versions of Anniversary with the bright lighting and the boring cut-scene and the Quick Time Event nonsense… It’s the same in the Wii version, except instead of pressing buttons you wave the remote and Nunchuk as directed. It feels silly.

I’ll actually go and say that unlike Ellie, I really like the gimmicky added Wii controls – such as having to tilt the wiimote backwards to pull levers or holding the nunchuck and wiimote facing each other and pulling them down to pull levers with handles, or having an “off hand” grappling hook activate with a flick of the nunhuck – thus not requiring you to move your fingers to another button in mid-jump. The rhythmic button pressing from Legend is also back in slightly modified shape. Instead of mashing A, you flick the nunchuck back and forth to speed up climbing, swimming or shimmying – a motion that long-term fans of the series should have little problem making while gaming.

What, did you think I could write about a Tomb Raider game without making a joke like that?

My main gripe with the “added” “puzzles” in the Wii version is that their implementation is rather… hamfisted. It’s the same two basic puzzles (a Lights Out!-style switch puzzle and a Connect-The-Gears puzzle), which would be fine if they hadn’t just done three variants/default setups on each and put the clue/item needed to solve them right bloody next to the puzzle itself. A bit more effort with this would have gone a fairly long way – just simply spreading the gears to pick up out a bit further, or moving the hint two rooms ahead instead of mounting it conveniently next to the puzzle mechanism, just, you know, things to make it seem less like they just carved out a niche and dropped Puzzle Prefab #2 into it in their level editor.

The graphics are as good as those in the PS2 game, though there’s a disgraceful amount of frame-dropping going on.

Again, an issue I can’t really say I noticed. I haven’t played the PS2 version so I can’t make adequate comparisons about the graphics, but I don’t really notice any significant slowdowns. The game doesn’t run at 60fps, but the framerate has been almost exclusively solidly playable for me so far. The only point where I did experience notable slowdowns was the Damocles chamber. I don’t quite see why, since there’s not an incredible amount of detail here, but I’m going to guess that it’s the sheer size of the room that makes the Wii sweat a bit.

All in all, I can only summarise that while the “problems” described in the Eurogamer review are indeed all present and in the game, I feel that their impact on the game is heavily exaggerated (if I’d even consider them to be a problem at all). Despite what the review says, I feel that the Wii version of Tomb Raider Anniversary, too, is an excellent re-imagining of an excellent game, and it’s refreshing to see a multiplatform game actually have some differences on a platform that’s different from others without completely redesigning it. It could’ve done with a bit more work put into the added puzzles, but doesn’t suffer too much.

In other news, I recently bought the Naki Ultimate Fighting Stick off eBay since this seems to be the only not completely shit arcade stick available for the Xbox. It boasts an impressive feature set by working with both the Xbox and PS2, having vibration motors and even two analogue “trackballs” that can be used as analog sticks on both consoles. It’s also wireless, running on a mere three AAA batteries.

Fighting Game Nerds over on the shoryuken.com forums stated that the buttons and stick on this thing were terrible, which worried me a bit – and, as it turns out, they weren’t quite wrong. The stick has a fairly large range of movement and the buttons feel a bit mushy, but it’s decent enough if you’re not an uber precision/speed geek. What bothers me the most is that the buttons don’t click as nicely as the ones on most other sticks. That aside, the above-linked thread also mentions that the parts can apparently be replaced with proper arcade-grade gear with not too much effort if you’re so inclined.

Aside from the buttons being somewhat spongy, the only things that bother me slightly are that the shoulder trigger buttons don’t work if the thing is connected to the Xbox (which is forgivable, considering that the triggers on the Xbox gamepad are fully analog) and that the plastic cover on the case hole for the stick is loose. This seems to be common practice though, but something that I consider a minor annoyance. There’s no input lag of note on either the PS or the Xbox, and the general feel and layout of the stick works quite well.

In general, I’m quite happy with this as a 30 quid purchase (including shipping). Being able to play Guilty Gear on my Xbox with a proper arcade stick = yes, and having a second stick around for the Playstation (I already own the official PS1 arcade stick by Asciiware) in case it’s necessary is also a nice thing.

Typhoon 2001, being a clone of Tempest 2000 (that being an excellent remake of the 1981 arcade game Tempest by the similarly-excellent Jeff Minter) is about Shooting Stuff That Comes At You Really Really Fast. The game setting consists of a web of corridors floating in Bizarro Space, with starfields that form beautifully symmetric patterns and distant layers of… something. Your blaster, also known as The Claw, is stuck to the upper end of the Web, and Stuff Comes At You Really Really Fast from the other one. That is all the story this game has, and all the story it needs.

You can move around the top and shoot down the corridors of said web to prevent Stuff that’s moving up the corridors from Getting To You And Splattering Your Entrails All Over The Freaking Place. There’s a small(ish) but nasty set of enemies, a few basic standard shmup powerups, many funky colours, a kickass pumping soundtrack… and this.

You are now officially boned.

The no-contest nastiest enemy among what the game throws at you are Pulsars. Yellow, lightning-shaped things that move very quickly and will periodically turn the corridor they’re on into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. Moreover, if you don’t dispatch of the bastard quickly enough, it will reach the upper end of the Web and turn THAT into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. At least the other enemies have the courtesy of just stumbling around the rim trying to chase you down – not so the pulsars. Instant Doom.

I loved Tempest 2000 with all my heart, but was a bit disappointed about it never having received a good clone or remake – and, to be frank, this very one was confusing, completely overloaded on visuals, slow as molasses and generally barely playable at all just about a year or one and a half ago. Massive props to the author for taking it and making this brilliant little piece of freegaming out of it. Just like in Tempest 2000, the graphics manage to be trippy and colourful, but never obscuring what’s going on in the game. Particularly the game’s recreation of T2000′s “particle displays”, which constructs text messages such as scoring numbers and PULSAR WARNING! out of separate dots, is quite brilliant and helps a lot – the concept allows for nice-looking graphical displays that you can still see through, without the need for annoying and boring solid-colour transparency.

So, yeah, if you like arcadey shoot’em’ups, you want to play this. And chances are that you will love it.

What impressed me is that, according to the game’s (ridiculously long) credits, Vin Diesel took quite a bit of involvement with this game beyond the voice acting – including production and design involvement. My respect for the man, which was barely even existent at first (I used to make horrible jokes about how Vin Diesel and Van Damme having the same initials), grows with just about any new project of his.

Okay, let’s gut this sucker. EFBB is pretty much a standard modern FPS, but it has quite a few things of note. One – it looks pretty freaking good, even with the low-res textures on the Xbox. We’re talking “puts up quite an impressive fight against HL2 and Doom3″ good. Two – the stealth is good as well. There’s not overly much of it, but it feels natural, good and is quite a lot of fun. Props to the design team for making this work so well. Three, and most importantly, at least the first third of the game – while being just as linear as the whole rest of it – has quite a few adventure-y elements. Different factions to align yourself with, side quests to do when you’re bored with the main plot, the whole shebang. Again, while it’s not excessively much, it feels like it just belongs. Even more respect to the design team.

There’s a few bad sides too – mostly, as I said, the mediocre and thinly-spread plot with lots and lots of filler material. It’s a bit like Half-Life in that respect, trying to tell a story but apparently not quite knowing how to. It feels less forced than it did in HL though, and the disjointed feeling of the plot with not only itself but also the rest of the franchise is more of a general problem of the Riddick franchise than a flaw in the game. Remember that biomechanical beast in Dark Fury that served no purpose at all but was pretty kickass when it showed up? Butcher Bay is basically like that, only that in Dark Fury it didn’t take you a couple hours of gameplay until you got around to wondering what the fuck that was all about anyway.

Other than that, the selection of guns isn’t exactly huge, and the guns are more tools than toys. Remember Doom’s shotgun and chainsaw, or Turok’s tree-felling triple rocket launcher and Cerebral Bore? Those weapons are toys, ie. insane fun to plough your way through the enemies with. Riddick’s weapons are – sadly – a lot more utilitarian than that; on the other hand, this helps the non-shooty elements of the game come into focus better (and boosts sales in the simulationist part of the target audience). Also, the hand to hand combat has a few very good ideas, but doesn’t work as well as it probably could. It’s cool and pretty complex for an FPS, but somewhat hard to willingly control.

Next on my mental list, the endgame has a few pacing problems. Not of Arx Fatalis proportions, but quite noticable nonetheless. The last half hour of gameplay has a sort-of climax, but a short and not exactly satisfying one. And that climax is not the final boss fight, which makes the pacing near the end of the game seem even more hell yes this is awesome oh hey there what the fuck is going on here wait what it’s over already what happened where’s my epic asskicking. This is sort of amplified by the insanely long credits, which give you about three hours of time to reflect on the game – and of course particularly on the part you just played.

Finally, it’s sort of missing the oneliners and “that’s totally badass” moments that the movies had. The tea cup/can opener from Chronicles, the fire extinguishing system and knife-burying threat from Dark Fury, that kind of stuff. Aside from Riddick, there’s less than a handful of even remotely memorable characters, and even those are… well, they’re in there somewhere, at least.

Oh, and: there is a final cutscene after the credits. Which you will have to sit through if you want to see it. Have fun.

To summarise my main points about the game with a (slightly expanded and horribly “I need a girlfriend” nerdy) oneliner that came to my mind when talking about it on IRC: It’s a bit like sex, only every time you look at your partner it’s somebody else and you don’t quite come in the end.

Nevertheless – if you haven’t played Escape from Butcher Bay yet, you should probably give it a spin. A few parts of it don’t quite know how they should do what they’re doing, but once all punches are pulled it’s a pretty damn good game. And that’s what counts.

HELL YES.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, 6SS happens to be pretty much my favorite movie of the past, oh, I don’t know, ever. Kickass music, glorious camera work, and a premise that is made of crack and awesome. Because I’m a lazy bum, I’ll just copy&paste a short review of it that I’d written someplace else when I’d first seen the movie.

So I had a vid night with some of the mates last night. We watched The Iron Giant, Seducing Doctor Lewis… and the one I’m going to recommend.
Six-String Samurai.

Think Lone Wolf and Cub meets Mad Max meets 1950′s Rock’n'Roll.
The basic premise is a wee bit wacky, but stick with me for a moment.
In 1957, the Cold War escalates and the Soviets end up nuking and invading the US. Hilarity ensues, Elvis (yes, the Elvis) gets crowned King of the remains and takes seat in “Lost Vegas”.
Fast-forward forty years. The King Is Dead. Vegas needs a new King. Road Rockers from all over the place start flocking towards Vegas to claim the throne as theirs. Among them Death himself, incarnated as a postapocalyptic version of Guns’n'Roses’ Slash. And, of course, the unnamed protagonist whom everyone just calls “Buddy” and who looks a very slight bit like Buddy Holly would after having survived the Nucular Holocaust Of Doom. I think.
Thus, Buddy sets out equipped only with his trusty six-string electric guitar – which conveniently happens to have a katana taped to it – his postapocalyptically torn-and-dirty tuxedo, his broken glasses and a battered parasol, for he has “a gig in Vegas”.
As we join him on his journey, he encounters a group of badlands wildmen chasing after a little kid and his mother. They kill the Mom, Buddy arrives and disposes of them with a little help from his awesome Rock’n'Roll Kung Fu (and his katana). The Kid sits there, pokes his Mom with a stick a few times, then bleats at Buddy who passes him by.
Buddy tells him to “Float away, little butterfly, just flutter away”, the kid stalks him. Buddy tells him a bit more directly to back the fuck off, but the kid just bleats and continues following anyway. The beginning of a wonderful friendship fo sho’.
The two travel through the desert heading for Vegas, kicking some wildman ass in a breakneck 15mph car chase, getting caught up with the Postapocalyptic Sitcom Family From Hell, running from guys in badly-taped space suits, and slaughtering the whole remains of the Red Army along the way.

I love it. This flick is stuffed to bursting with various pop culture and rock’n'roll references, from the lead character, his nemesis, a cameo by A Guy Who Looks Suspiciously Like Clint Eastwood, the whole Samurai Tale concept, a bunch of Spaghetti Western spoofs, the all-pervasive Mad Max style, up to the store in a town called Fallout (seriously) which is owned by a Gangsta Midget who quotes The Wizard of Oz (yes, seriously).
Oh, and the soundtrack is played by a Russian-spawned Rock’n'Roll band called The Red Elvises.

There’s a trailer and ad blurb here. Six-String Samurai being a rather Indie production from 1998, it is somewhat hard to get regularly now, but can still be acquired through the usual intarweb outlets for decent prices.

“That is not dead which may eternal lie…”

After my visit to the nether hells, I am glad to be still alive, but nobody believes what I have to report. The fools – they don’t see what is going on in front of their very eyes; they’re too closed minded to recognise the things waiting for them just outside of their field of view which is so constricted by the blindfolds of their concept of reality. But I can understand… had I known the horrible, unearthly terrors that were waiting for me, I’d have turned back at once. And it all just looked like a game in the beginning…

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is the first part in a planned trilogy of games and tells the story of Boston cop Jack Walters and his encounters with the unseen things beyond our reality. It all starts out harmless, with his job being finding a missing store manager in the small coastal town Innsmouth. Walters soon finds out that there’s something more going on in the village – the inhabitants are uncooperative and hostile, rumor has it that there’s a bizarre change going on with them, and the whole town is overshadowed by an ominous religious cult. In first person perspective, the player explores the town and discovers its secrets, puzzle piece by puzzle piece. In the beginning, the whole thing is very much like an adventure game – you walk around, talk to the locals, find hints about what has happened to the missing guy and what’s going on in the town in general every now and then. Soon, the uncooperative behavior of the local folk turns into direct attempts at impede Walters’ investigations, and a bit later into a hunt aimed at getting rid of him once and for all.

Sadly, the gameplay follows this change: Dark Corners of the Earth takes a few hours, then mutates from a First Person Adventure to a shooter with adventure elements, which makes the otherwise excellent presentation of the nicely wrought plot suffer a bit. It’s particularly not very Lovecraft to have the main character shoot his way through loads of horrible creatures to advance the plot. Nevertheless, the latter part of the game still sports a brilliant atmosphere worthy of the Cthulhu title. The plot in general is also very fitting in its basic concept and execution, but still has a few points where it runs slightly to massively against the typical style of the inspiring tales. It’s hard to tell more about it without spoiling massive parts of the plot, which is why I’m not going to do so; uncovering the events is just as much part of the game as the gameplay itself. The inventory has a notebook used by Walters to write diary entries explaining his thoughts and feelings on the events and to collect the many small and bigger bits and pieces of information he finds. These are often relevant for puzzles, so they’re worth reading closely.

On top of that, Dark Corners of the Earth takes not necessarily new, but at least little-used paths even in the First Person Shooter department. There’s neither a gauge for the main character’s health nor a crosshair or an ammo gauge – the inventory shows how many bullets of every type you have in total, but you can only guess how many shots you have left in the loaded clip. To make hitting enemies easier, you can steady the weapon and take aim – but holding the gun in front of himself for too long makes Walters’ arms tire and start to shake. The physical health of the character is only indicated by various rough hints: his breathing grows ever more shallow, colours start fading to grey and his vision blurs slightly as he takes damage. Combat is rather deadly as it is already – even a single hit from a gun will usually massively hamper Walters’ agility, and three or four hits will more often than not put a premature end to his investigations. Wounds need to be treated with the contents of first aid kits, not unlike Metal Gear Solid 3 – if you leave them open, they constantly cost more health until they either heal by themselves after some time or Walters has bled to death. Taking care of your wounds also takes a moment in which you’re completely helpless, so there’s not really a way to heal up during combat. In case of emergency, the inventory also holds a syringe of morphine, which you can use to keep death at bay for a moment longer and which will suppress the shaking caused by injuries; using it does impair vision via a lot of blurring and tunnel vision though.

In addition to physical health, you also need to take care of Walters’ mental condition: he can’t just die of wounds, but also just go insane due to continued exposition to unnatural or just plain traumatising things. There’s no gauge here as well, just a couple of factors indicating his state. Normally, you’ll hear Walter’s heartbeat speeding up, accompanied by rhythmic vibration of the controller. Looking down from great heights will make him sway slightly and give tunnel vision. Examining a rotting corpse or looking at monsters for extended amounts of time will generally blur his eyesight and fill his surroundings with various weird noises. The effects aren’t executed in as much detail and creativity as in Eternal Darkness on the GameCube – which Dark Corners of the Earth has quite a few things in common with in general though – but fulfill their purpose by enhancing the atmosphere and giving the player an impression of the character’s mental state. Proper hallucinations or other concrete results of insanity sadly aren’t there; only occasional scripted visions that warn of potential attackers or just build more atmosphere.

From a technical standpoint, there’s a few less nice things to report: the game has quite a few bugs already known in the developer’s forums which have been encountered by a number of players – usually resulting in a deadlock of the Xbox and sometimes even reoccurring in the same place after loading the latest savegame. At least one of these is related to a certain save point and cost me my save during testing; after loading, the game keeps running for about a second more and then reproducably locks up at the same point, no matter what I do. There are a few other scenes that had some user reports of reappearing crashes – in general, the game is running stable and without problems, but apparently there’s a few places that have potential for fatal, game-breaking problems like this. Seeing as how Dark Corners of the Earth doesn’t use Xbox Live – for obvious reasons – at least the Xbox version probably won’t be seeing an update either. To make sure you won’t fall victim of such problems, I’d recommend using several save slots at all times. On the Xbox 360, the game is playable, but has two known problems in addition to the ones already present on the Xbox: the intro and epilogue videos aren’t shown, and the emulation will crash if one of the bosses uses a certain attack of his. The gameplay has little to criticise: some puzzles aren’t exactly obvious or depend on tiny details and need some trial and error or just plain and simple a quick glance at a walkthrough to find the proper solution; occasionally there’s also places that need some searching to find the next piece of the generally rather linear path through the levels.

Graphics: Hallucinogenic substances

The graphics in Call of Cthulhu are excellent both atmospherically and technically; while some of the character models seem a bit coarse at times, the game is quite pretty and the levels detailed and believable. Adding to this are all kinds of nice special effects: irregular glass will distort what’s behind it, there’s a moment of adaptation when moving between light and dark areas, sources of light don’t have any sharp borders, the usual bag of graphical tricks. The consequences of insanity on Mr. Walters’ eyesight are of note as well, as are the distortions and places of blurriness in his occasional visions. A bit more creativity in the hallucinations would’ve been nice, but they’re decent enough and create a nice whole together with the rest of the graphics work.

Sound: Smaller and bigger language barriers

For a game relying so heavily on atmosphere and horror like Call of Cthulhu, sound is particularly important. Headfirst Productions deliver an excellent performance in this department – the game sounds glorious, in quality and style alike. Proper music is really only there during menu screens; in the game its place is taken by mostly melody-free atmospheric instrumentation. Environment sounds vary heavily in amount and detail. Sometimes, the silence is only filled by the game’s replacement for music, at other times there’s not much to hear of that and the environment itelf is alive with all kinds of sounds – footsteps of people walking around, cultists mumbling in bizarre languages and other, weirder noises. On the whole, the sound in the game creates tension and discomfort quite effectively – and that’s what a game in Lovecraft’s world should do.

The language Call of Cthulhu is running in is being determined by the Microsoft Dashboard’s language setting – although this only changes the language of the subtitles; the voiceovers are always in their original English. Thus, if you’re not used to reading subtitles and aren’t very trained in English, you might run into some problems. On the other hand, players who speak the language well enough can enjoy the game completely in its original language by just setting the Xbox menu language to English. The translation occasionally changes the meaning of the original text and particularly struggles a bit when there’s idioms, but is understandable and fitting in all important parts. Seldom there’s also passages that were apparently overlooked as the game was translated and are still in English even if the language is set to German; while this is a bit of an annoyance and doesn’t exactly testify a thorough checkup of the translation, the lack of a German version of these passages shouldn’t prevent even players completely illiterate in English from getting ahead in the game.

“… but with strange aeons, even death may die.”

Call of Cthulhu may not be quite what you’d expect from a game set in the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, and it isn’t what the first couple hours of gameplay might make you hope either, but in spite of quite a few flaws in both areas a title of good quality both technically and in content and a refreshing change from the usual “hey, let’s send some monsters through the windows with a lot of noise all of a sudden and give the player as little ammo as possible” material in self-proclaimed horror games. Personally, I hope that Headfirst will get the chance to continue their trilogy and pick up and improve upon the points of criticism the first game has. It remains to see whether the PC version – which is still without a release date – will iron out the technical problems or if we’ll be seeing a direct, unchanged port of the Xbox release.

Tech Specs

Platform: Xbox
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Headfirst Productions
Genre: Shooter/Adventure
Release: Xbox already released (26.10.2005), PC announced
Web: http://www.callofcthulhu.com/
Age rating: 18+ (PEGI), M (ESRB), 16+ (USK)
MSRP: EUR 39,95

Crash Bandicoot is probably one of the oldest franchises that found their beginning on Sony’s consoles – even on the first PlayStation, the two 3D jump’n'run games that started the series enjoyed great popularity. Using the slightly crazy Crash as its protagonist, the games have held their footing to this day. The last major PS1 title with the Crash Bandicoot name was Crash Team Racing, an action racing game in the vein of Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing. Crash Tag Team Racing as the newest incarnation continues the concept of racing games with zany humor on the PS2 as well as the XBox and the GameCube.

Plutonium, Explosive Chickens and Kamikaze Chimps

Radical Entertainment chose a background setting for their game that already is somewhat reminiscent of Diddy Kong Racing – the game is set in a large theme park which is split up into five differently-themed areas and a central hub area. The separate parks are the caribbean pirate world Mystery Island, the dinosaur island Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, the Science Fiction area Astro Land, the Egyptian desert and pyramid landscape Tomb Town and the fairy kingdom Happily Ever Faster. Each of the parks again consists of a central hub area that gives access to three racing tacks each, contains some minigames and a bunch of other minor goals. The latter start as simple as collecting coins to buy new outfits for characters, speed past the opening of hidden shortcuts on the racing tracks and finish at locating (and getting to) energy crystals that will unlock new vehicles and previously-inaccessible areas of the themed parks. Aside from the three racing tracks, there’s also an arena to be found in every of the five parks, which can be played in multiplayer or in a stunt mode. The game also supplies a nice overview of current missions in the pause menu so you don’t lose track of all that stuff you can do. Added to the mission overview are sometimes greatly amusing hints that can be gotten from the various characters. Many of the missions are limited to banally collecting coins and energy crystals, others are a bit more complicated and have specific goals, for example finding a canister of plutonium that one character needs to get his new vehicle started – this canister is, as is to be expected of plutonium canisters located in theme parks, just lying around. You only need to find a way to where it is. Another example for the missions would be buying a ballerina costume for one of the characters because he (rightly so) thinks he’s horribly ugly.

The areas that are explored on foot basically play just like the Crash Bandicoot Jump’n'Runs did back then: you walk around, smash crates to find coins and explore the park while looking for energy crystals and the keys for the different theme parks. At the start of the game, only Mystery Island is open, and every theme park hides a key that will unlock the door to another one. Many characters can be talked to; that way, playable ones sometimes give new missions or just more or less stupid comments. Random park visitors will only yield the latter. As a small bonus, there’s various places in the park that can be used in one of various ways to trigger a short movie – usually gag reels or dramatically silly scenes that end Crash up dying in one of more than forty variously cruel ways. All of these movies can, after being discovered, be accessed from the main menu as well. The only major difference to “normal” jump’n'run games in the on-foot part is that there is no limit of lives – you can die as often as you want, the game will never be prematurely over and thus put you back to the last time you saved. If you die, you instantly get put back to the point from which you took the final step into your doom.

The racing parts are complete standard fare, but with a few interesting extra features to spice things up a bit. While cruising the courses, you can’t only pick up powerups that will yield explosive chickens, dynamite-wielding chimps or homing fireballs to get rid of annyoing competition with, but also spontaneously merge with any of your competitors. This results in a combo similar to Mario Kart Double Dash – one of the two merged characters becomes driver, the other one takes a gunner position. Places can be switched at will; even in single player mode, you can just hand control of the vehicle to your temporary computer partner and concentrate on clearing the way with your character dependent turret. Sadly, the screen is a bit unwieldy in racing mode – there is a rear view mirror, but it’s hard to make anything at all out in there, and there is no gauge that shows what powerup you’re holding – thus, you always need to take your eyes off the road for a moment to check what your character has in his or her hands. Depending on how you fare in the race, there’s money coming in at the end of the three-lap rush; there’s additional bonuses for enemies you take out, extra prize money for the first three places and energy crystals for the winner.

The race tracks are also playable in one of five modes with varying goals. Crashinator places fixed targets on the track that you need to ram as many as possible of during one time-limited lap. Race is, as the name suggests, an ordinary competition with any of the eight characters against the other seven. Fast Lap requires driving a single lap with as short as possible a time. The Rolling Thunder mode puts you on track with a random character in gunner position and counts how many other characters you blow up with the turret, and Hit And Run has you firing your turret at moving off-track targets.

Graphics

As befits a Crash Bandicoot game, the graphics are colorful, not to say blindingly so. The characters as well as levels willingly use comparatively few polygons to further underline the comic style of the graphics, the textures usually have razor-sharp color changes and generally large, flat colored areas. Animations are fluid, detailed and also comically overdrawn, if sometimes a little low in numbers – for example Crash, as the lead character, sports only a mere three different idle animations for when you leave him standing around a bit. In general, the game has a consistent style though, and usually goes for simplicity in place of overdone detail. Additionally, there are neither noticable jerkiness nor graphics bugs – while the graphics are not astonishing from a technical nor stylistic point of view, they are done well and consequently in both areas.

“Ze violence, it is vonderful!”

The most notable part about CTTR’s sound are the voiceovers: characters have excellent, if often silly, dialogue in jump’n'run mode. Hopping around on the heads of random park visitors or even other characters, beating them or otherwise abusing them, they respond with usually amusing comments (I think I spent WAY too much time just jumping on random people’s heads just to hear their reaction), and the characters also have various great oneliners to deliver during the races. The translation is also done thoroughly and turned out well – not always true to word and meaning, but always as amusing as the originals and without any screwups of note.

The game’s music is… well… unique. Similarly to probably all other games of the series, Tag Team Racing has what could best be described as “typical” video game music – catchy, short and simple melodies with simple rhythms underneath. Instrument choices are often on the silly side, which fits the game nicely. Put short, the music would probably drive deaf men to madness within minutes if the game didn’t go along with it so well. Sound effects are, just like the music and voiceovers, silly but fitting. The suddenly-stopping clucking of the exploding chickens, the screaming of the kamikaze chimps and the nice explosions are a good soundtrack to the zaniness going on on the screen.

The English language version of CTTR is also included on the DVD and, in my opinion, has even better voiceovers – particularly Ebeneezer von Clutch, sporting a saxon dialect in the German translation, is “Ze German” in the English original – including his best Indiana Jones Nazi English with heavy accent and occasionally “ja!” thrown in. The language used by the game is determined by the PS2′s language setting – if you want to hear the English voices, just set the PS2 menu to English and start the game. I suspect the XBox and GameCube versions behave just like that, although I can’t verify this theory for lack of either.

Things I Learned From Crash Tag Team Racing

Should I ever urgently need plutonium, it might be a good idea to just take a look around a theme park. And jumping on random people’s heads might not make me a better person, but provokes amusing comments. And it’s crazy fun, just like the rest of the game. The humor is a bit too puerile at times (“my god, it’s full of fart jokes”), but usually decent and bizarre in a good way. I couldn’t try out the multiplayer modes because I only own a single PS2 controller and CTTR could not be moved to accept any of my three PS1 joypads even as present. I guess the multiplayer adds more replay value though. Buy or rent? From my point of view, a definite Buy.

Every character can be assigned a certain number of cards based on his or her level (20 at the start of the game). These cards are shuffled, and a certain number are drawn in the first battle. Every character has several “attacks” per turn, which are executed by playing several cards after each other; every played card is replaced by the topmost one from the character’s deck. If your deck runs out, the character pauses for a turn while his deck is being reshuffled. The trick is that you only have until one card’s battle animation has finished playing to choose the next one. If you’re too slow, your chain of attacks ends early.

There are no separate “commands” as in other battle systems, but different types of cards. Attack cards, Defense cards, Recovery cards. Some have more than one property (ie. most swords have Attack and Defense) and can be played in more than one situation. If an enemy attacks a character, the procedure is the same as with you attacking – if you don’t play a card until the attack animation finishes hitting the character, he’s hit without any defense. If you play quickly enough, the card’s Defense value is subtracted from the attacker’s card’s Attack value after all his attacks are done and damage for the chain of attacks is evaluated for the turn.

To add even more complexity to it all, certain combos of cards will result in the final card of the combo “transforming”, conjuring a different effect than normally (über extra damage and the like).

The whole “play quickly or die” concept makes the battle system more fast-paced than just about any other turn-based system I’ve seen before, and the fact you’re issuing commands to the characters via decks of cards adds both strategy (setting up the decks for the characters) and an element of randomness. I like.

Other than that, Baten Kaitos permanently breaks the fourth wall by adding the player as a “guardian spirit” who’s engaged in a spiritual bond with the main character Kallas. This is only occasionally actually noticeable though, mainly when Kallas turns to the camera and asks the player what he thinks they should do. From what the game told me so far, Kallas have his own ideas about what’s right though, and the relationship between him and the player influences battle performance among other things. Pretty interesting stuff.

Let me say this much – HL2 ends just like it starts – very, very abruptly. The ending makes most of the game seem rather pointless, in a “Uh, dudes, I can’t think of an ending” kind of way. In general, HL2 is very much like its predecessor – in particular in that it spectacularly excels at skillfully avoiding doing too many new things.

Oh yes, it is pretty, but looking at other games – in particular this year’s incarnations of the Metal Gear Solid series, Twin Snakes and Snake Eater – it’s not as spectacular as it’s made out to be. Yes, the facial animation is nice, but seeing as how Valve circumvented any kind of player-induced changes by cleverly hard scripting all scenes that gave the player time to properly look at people’s faces, it doesn’t seem all that awesome.

Also, while I was only playing it on medium Texture and Model detail due to lack of RAM in my machine, the texture and model quality massively fluctuated from “good” to “what the fuck, this looks like Quake 2 or Quake 3″.

The gameplay is, as in HL1, about as pedestrian as it comes. The physics engine is a marvelous toy, but you’re not really able to do anything you weren’t supposed to be able to do. Other than that, HL2 is an über-linear run&gun shooter, just like HL1. It does do a better job at hiding the fact that you can’t go anywhere you’re not supposed to than HL1, but not everywhere and not much.

The vehicles are fun – a lot more fun than Far Cry’s; you can actually go faster than 20km/h without completely losing control and randomly crashing into things – but still no real competition for Halo’s vehicles, which were both sufficiently plausible in physics and really, really fun to drive.

The level geometry is another thing that caught my attention – I used to do some mapping myself, so I tend to pay a bit more attention to that kind of thing. Most of the levels look like they’d been modelled in Lego. Square houses, rectangular houses, a really large amount of the major level geometry is done in 90° angles. Or, to put it another way, much of the game’s level design is rather bland if you take a closer look.

It was a fun ride while it lasted, with the exception of a few places, but I’m sorry to say that I can’t agree with any of the major gaming press who call it “revolutionary”. If there’s anything Half-Life 2 is not, it’s revolutionary. Evolutionary, maybe. Sorry, Gordon.

Next up in the queue: Paper Mario – The 1000 Year Door and Metal Gear Solid 3 – Snake Eater. I played a bit of both so far, and I like what I’ve seen.