Format: PC | Genre: Adventure (casual) | Publisher: Big Fish | Developer: Big Fish | Release date: 03/09/09 | RRP: $6.99

In a dismal fantasy world, the King’s daughter is missing.

Posters are plastered around town, offering handsome rewards to anyone who can guarantee her safe return.  Held captive at the top of a vast tower, the girl sends a help message out into the wind.  You find it, and through the trapped girl’s gift to make her drawings come to life, you set about to carve a path up the dark, twisting tower, unlocking each of its secrets and making your way to her rescue.

This is a curious game.  It’s a short, casually oriented point-and-click adventure that falls into a number of typical genre pitfalls.  The story is as tired as you’ll get.  The hints system, while nice in theory, is seriously flawed.  The dialogue and voice acting are preposterous, the puzzles are frequently too abstract, and the whole game is drenched in a chunky low-budget sauce.  It has no right to work.

So it threw me a bit that the other day, when I finished playing it, my immediate reaction was to start up a new game.  It’s completely linear – you can go into the next room, or you can backtrack to an old one, and that’s about it – so there’s no urge to try out new ideas or play differently.  There are no added bonuses to be gained from having completed the game.  And… okay, there’s an obvious reason why I may have felt compelled to return: it’s four hours long, and the ending’s a little problematic.  There’s no crescendo, no exponentially rising sense of urgency as you fight your way to the very top of this magical tower.  So maybe I was just disappointed, and now, half way through my second attempt, am scraping the barrel and hoping to milk it for all that’s there.  But I don’t think so.  There’s something else.

//Puzzling
It’s something less concrete that makes Drawn, initially an unassuming game, strangely engrossing.  This is a tactile yet cerebral adventure, a mix of traditional and more abstract adventuring.  There are inventory puzzles, which mostly work well, aside from a few huge backtracks in the name of repeated pixel-hunting.  And there are mini-game puzzles – Myst-like, experimental tests, where working out what you’re supposed to be doing forms most of the challenge.  But it’s Drawn’s strong sense of identity that helps it stand out.  Each environment is stunningly hand-painted, often teeming with an unusual amount of life.  It’s largely static, with some dynamic effects layered over the top, but it’s a solid image that’s maintained throughout the game.  Holding it all together is a beautiful, evocative soundtrack, swelling and rising with each new discovery.

It’s all rather striking, despite the frequent mundanity of the gameplay.  Drawn is very much targeted at the casual audience, and makes no attempt to forward the genre in any meaningful way.  You’ll do a lot of clicking, a lot of hands-on puzzling and a lot of hunting for, combining and using objects, all in a mostly satisfying yet clearly uninspiring manner.  The mini-game puzzles, oddly, can be skipped if you’re having too much difficulty, which will mean less patient players could see Drawn to its conclusion in a fraction of its already short lifespan.  And a hints system, nice enough in theory, fails to impress.  There are almost always three hints available for each puzzle, with the next one becoming available after a fairly lengthy ‘recharging’ period.  Yet it fails to adapt to your actions.  In some of the more complex puzzles, it’s common to have completed almost everything that’s required, yet still have to wait for the first two hints to prod you in the direction of something you’ve already done.  When you’re hopelessly stuck, even more waiting around isn’t exactly desirable.

Still, the vivid world holds it all together with aplomb.  For all its conceptual weakness, even the story manages to charm effortlessly, and saving this helpless little girl becomes the only thing on your mind.  There’s very little cut-scene exposition, too – aside from a few major plot points, many of the details are filled in through collectable notes left scattered around the world.  Drawn understands how to cement a sense of place, no matter how unimaginitive its origins.

For most games, being only a few hours long would be a serious blow.  But at under $7, it could be a no-brainer for certain audiences.  While Drawn is unlikely to leave a lasting impact on the genre’s landscape, it does make an immediate impact on the player, with a world that inspires despite the predictable mechanics contained within it.  Considering the mega-budget price, it’s certainly worth a look.

6/10

What does this score mean?

You can purchase Drawn: The Painted Tower from the Big Fish website. You’ll have to download their client, but it’s perfectly innocent and runs happily in the background.

Format: PC | Genre: Adventure | Publisher: Lucas Arts | Developer: Lucas Arts | Released: 1998
Why now? It’s not dead yet…

By Christos Reid

Do you ever think about death? It’s often easy to start thinking about the ramifications of your mortality when it’s three in the morning and you’re lying in bed, post-gaming session. But how do we make games come to life in the Land of the Dead?

When I first saw Grim Fandango, I knew instantly it was the one game I wished I’d designed myself. The art style, the narrative, even the light jazz sounding off in the dark Rubacavan night – all were perfectly placed and thought-out, and couldn’t have captured the game’s vision more. Grim Fandango challenged the idea of the point-and-click adventure, twisting Monkey Island’s oft-humorous quips into dark, cynical commentaries on the players’ actions, as they desperately attempt to solve the puzzles they stumble across as they cross the Underworld in search of a woman, and themselves.

//A four-year hero
Manny Calavera, the game’s protagonist, takes his name from a variety of sources, his surname being Spanish for “skull.” Why mess around? Mario was originally called JumpMan, and by God it should’ve stayed that way. Manny is a dead human being, and his name is a Spanish rendition of “male skull.” This WYSIWYG approach to simply naming a character seemed – and still seems – so much less pretentious than the long, spindly names of the inhabitants of Monkey Island.

The game spends a lot of the opening sequences trying to teach you as much as possible about the world you inhabit, as even the back of the box indicates that you’ll be staying there for four years, so you may as well be comfortable. This is no “hell” level, no cyber-demons to kill; this is the habitat for those who have crossed over, and like any human habitat, there must be a key industry. This time, the key industry is death. Manny works at the Department of Death, as something of a travel agent, offering various afterlife packages to people dependent on the life they led in the land of the still-breathing. Gold tickets allow you to sit on a train for four minutes, offered to nuns, and other such nice, pleasant people. Act like a bastard, and it’s a four-year trek across a dangerous vista of monsters and dark forests, without a guaranteed success.

For Manny, the choice isn’t so simple. His life above ground was exceptionally badly-led, and as a result he’s stuck working off the moral debt he created for himself, post excessum. Stuck with him is Glottis, a colossal demon born to drive, but never allowed to due to his size, simply wasting away his days as the department’s mechanic. Two misfits, with one purpose: to rebel against a system they feel is unfair. With a cannibalised car, a demon driver and a mind for stealing a client who’ll finally get Manny the commission he needs to cross over, they tear off into the land of the living.

Your glimpses of the Land of the Living are horrifying at first. All the living beings are gross, two-dimensional parodies of human musculature. This could easily be seen as symbolic, that we only truly become ourselves once the fear and obstacle of death is removed. Yet Manny remains determined in his desire to cross over. What lies past the gates? Oblivion? Heaven? It’s never clear, but Tim Schafer managed to create a likeable, but spiritually suicidal character, a prospect both terrifying and engaging.

There’s a debate over Tim Schafer’s games and their engaging gameplay – that is to say, whether or not it exists. Allow me to contend the former, with Grim Fandango as my vehicle of self-righteous Tim propaganda. Grim Fandango’s puzzles were never the “use the pipe on the honey to open the door, then use the screw on the potato to start the car” level of ridiculous luck and guesswork that became the off-putting staple-mark of point-and-click adventure titles. There’s a pneumatic tube in your offices, used to send encapsulated missives to the travel agents, or more specifically, the really good clients to the guy next door, Domino. How to intercept one? You have a pack of cards, and a tube that requires air to rush through for it to chuck capsules down its length. Card in tube, new client. Of course, we are cynical, and we suspect Domino is corrupt as he gets all the good clients and we get none, though we share the same job title.

Did I say we? This is the incredible thing about Manny; his constant verbal critique of the world around him is what makes him such an easy character to become. “Don’t have that kind of equipment,” he laments as you attempt to have him pick up the Moon, and you begin to wonder if he’s either joined a secretive cult of hyper-sarcasm, or if he’s truly breaking the fourth wall with Tim Schafer as his sledgehammer. He’s a developed character in his own right, much as Guybrush was, and through his critique of the world around him he’ll often lead you to the next link in the chain of puzzles.

//Death and tourists
The world itself was something of beauty. 1930s art deco sat comfortably next to Mayan architecture, combining the two themes into something that was both stylish and mythological. Of course, the thirties was a fantastic era for film noir and classic crime narrative, so of course, everybody smokes. But for once this isn’t a problem, because everybody’s dead. Today’s characters tend not to suck down cancerous smoke if they can avoid it, but through using characters who couldn’t suffer from the smoke they inhaled (with what lungs, I’m not so sure), it suddenly became stylish again.

Manny’s journey takes him through various locales, though you’ll eventually notice the pattern of events as each of the years he spends in the underworld comes to a close. The camera slowly slinks back out of a window, with Manny mopping the floor of wherever he’s ended up, followed by a “one year later” title, and a zoom back into a completely transformed environment with him at the head of it, smoking and gazing over his success. For all his failures as a travel agent, he’s a damned successful businessman, capable of turning around everything from a diner to a cargo ship.

As a result of this, no area stays foreign for long, and you’re never left feeling like a fish out of water. It’s surprising, in theory, that you’re able to discern character from character, their stylised facial features simply black lines and circles on a three-dimensional ellipse. But through the addition or removal of some of these lines, and slight discolouration added (we know the lead antagonist is evil because he’s the only yellowed set of bones in the game, making him an effortlessly defined outsider), infinite characters can be created, and we can tell Manny from Domino – though the latter’s eponymous markings may help somewhat.

Sometimes I would play for hours, delving into the game and racking up my phone bill by calling a friend and trying to explain a puzzle that had stumped me, only for the answer to emerge while I slowly talked it out. Sometimes I would play simply for the cut-scenes, or to see whether, years later, I could still remember how to solve everything. Most of the time I couldn’t, but that was what made the game so magical. Adventure titles have puzzles that will literally bring forth tears of frustration, but to see Manny’s pleasure written in both his dialogue and across his face when you solve it, together, is a reward that completing Gears of War 2 on Insane difficulty will never provide.

Of all the tools for puzzle solving, there is one that has become the striking emblem of the Land of the Dead, both in Grim Fandango and popular culture: the reaper’s scythe. Manny’s scythe unfolds, much like a mic stand or a camera’s tripod, and all at once you have the solution to both how the Grim Reaper fits that colossal farming tool in his cloak, and how such an ancient weapon could be brought into an environment that is, aesthetically at least, sitting in the twentieth century. Its uses are far and wide, from hovering it over cat litter to find a metal detector, to jamming a door shut – but never for taking lives. Only once do you see Manny do his job, and even then the item remains purely ceremonial. It lends something of a corporate image to Death, and thus allows us to swallow the story of corruption and betrayal for the sake of money even more easily.

Betrayal tends to come in the form of “sprouting” in Grim Fandango. In a game where bullets are going to be about as much use as a chocolate kettle, bullets that allow flowers to grow on the skeleton of a character, “laying them to rest” as it were, are lethal – and the game is full of emotionally charged scenes with those who have been sprouted. But how to maintain the impact of death in a land where the obstacle of mortality has been removed? Simple. Shoot it like the death scene from Chinatown, complete with melodramatic “it’s my time to go” dialogue and a well-crafted soundtrack, and you have your death scene. Death doesn’t have to be fatal in games, but if it isn’t, it at least has to be moving.

However, to move a player, what better way than through subtle use of music? Music is absolutely everywhere in Grim Fandango¸ whether diegetic or otherwise; and it fits the mood, never distracting, simply emphasising what’s taking place on screen. From the Mexican mariachi tones of “Companeros” (comrades), played at the Day of the Dead festival (conveniently the one day per year you experience in the game), to the swanky thirties big band jazz warbles of “Casino Calavera,” the music is always enthralling. So many modern games seem to rely on either scores lifted from their companion films, the EA catalogue of licensed music, or simply maddening techno. It’s a shame games composers often lack the hindsight to see the reason why this game’s soundtrack sells without fail for around a hundred dollars every time it shows up on eBay. In the day of Nobuo Uematsu and a few others, I pine for the days of Fandango and its atmospheric ear-heroin.

//Manny, we miss you
To understand Grim Fandango requires little, save for the puzzles that may prove to be something of a challenge. However, to understand its message, the meaning behind a game that proved to be one of Schafer’s biggest labours of love, you simply have to listen to one of Manny’s last lines. As he sits on the train that will finally take him into his destiny, hand in hand with the love of his afterlife, he muses on his experiences. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” he says, “it’s this: nobody knows what’s going to happen at the end of the line, so you might as well enjoy the trip.”

What a trip it was.

By Chris Evans

“The art style is some kind of steampunk. A lot of inspiration comes from old, rusty machines, abandoned factories and industrial buildings.”

Jakub Dvorský, lead designer of Machinarium, is telling me about the aesthetic of Amanita Design’s next game. It’s certainly the first thing I noticed upon playing the current build: it’s like nothing else I’ve seen and really sets Machinarium apart from other titles in the new generation of indie games. There’s a reason it won the Excellence in Visual Art Award at this year’s Independent Games Festival.

//Junk for joy
Machinarium harks back to the classic adventure games of yesteryear: a 2D point-and-click with a variety of puzzles thrown in for good measure. But rather than taking place on a monkey island or in a city where the local police force consists of a dog and a rabbit, Machinarium sees you take control of, in Jakub’s own words, “a young little scruffy robot” called Josef. “He’s named after Josef Capek – Czech painter and initial inventor of the word robot,” Jakub tells me. “At the beginning of the game, we don’t know much about either the main hero nor about the Machinarium city and whole world.”

It’s true. When you start to play, little Josef is in pieces amongst a whole load of junk. All you know is that this robot has been dumped here, and your first task is to reassemble his body. The various features of the game are introduced rather simply in this opening section: you drag Josef’s head up to reach higher places and down if you want him to grab something below him. After moving a bathtub to get Josef’s head reattached to his body, you have to interact with a Hoover – this is where you will first encounter the thought bubbles that both give you hints about what you have to do and tell you the story.

“When the little robot sees new characters or locations he will have flashbacks – often short stories he remembers about that character from the past,” Jakub explains. “It’s usually a simple black-and-white animation in a comic bubble above Josef’s head. He also has dreams, and he can communicate with other characters through these comic bubbles. There is no speech or text in Machinarium.” It’s an interesting approach, but one that comes off very well.

//A world apart
Without spoiling too much about what we’ve learnt of the story, some basics. Once you’ve managed to get Josef into the city, after impersonating a police officer and hitching a ride in a coal wagon, you meet the arch villains of the piece, the Black Cap Brotherhood. It’s clear that the group are preparing to bomb the central tower of Machinarium, and it becomes your job to stop them. I wondered at first if this was some sort of social commentary, but Jakub assured me it isn’t. “Of course there are some references to reality,” he says, “but we aren’t trying to comment on anything. Machinarium is primarily a comedy.” Indeed, the jokes shine through in refreshing contrast to the bleak, oppressed feel that emanates from the city.

It is important to know that Jakub wants to set Machinarium apart from its contemporaries. “Compared to other titles in the genre,” he muses, “I think we try to put bigger emphasis on details and things which aren’t in the main focus – like the subtle animation jokes, music that’s composes carefully for each location, or the fact that every building, character and item in the game has its own history and meaning.” The subtle jokes in the animation are indeed great – there’s nothing like seeing a magnet at the start of the game get stuck to Josef’s little head.

Jakub and his team are investing a lot of time and love into Machinarium. The screenshots alone showcase something exciting, and seeing it in motion adds so much character to these robots. Impressively, the gameplay is top-notch, even in this early build. Some puzzles stumped me, but Jakub promises that the difficultly will be tweaked a bit before release. “We want to add some hints to places where it’s too difficult to find out what to do,” he reassures me. And though there are currently a handful of relatively significant bugs, with a few months before release these should be ironed out.

Jakub is confident that Machinarium will be vastly more expansive than the previous games from Amanita Design, such as the web-game series Samorost. “Compared to Samorost,” he says, “Machinarium will be bigger and more detailed, with a stronger storyline and more logical puzzles. There will be an inventory, and a couple of other new features such as in-built mini-games and, of course, the animated communication among characters.”

//Size is everything
Perhaps most amazing is that only seven people are working on Machinarium. Compared with games like World of Goo and Audiosurf this may seem huge, but in the grand scheme of things to have only seven people working on a title this detailed is astounding. I certainly get the feeling from talking to Jakub that it is the small size of the team that has allowed them to create Machinarium in just the way they wanted.

It shows plenty of promise. A few of the puzzles need tidying up, but some of them are genuinely innovative. It looks beautiful, and through the hand-drawn levels and characters you can really feel the human touch in the game. Assuming its minor problems are fixed before release, Machinarium looks sets to be a decidedly welcome addition to the indie game scene.

For more information on Machinarium, head on over to the game’s official website.

By Lewis Denby

There’s a puzzle about a quarter of the way through Pahelika that involves being interrogated by a mob of gargoyles. To pass, you’ve to correctly answer questions such as “What is it to be fearless?” and “What are our lives leading up to?” Eventually you’ll be asked whether or not God exists, and whatever you say in response, you’ll be granted access to the next area, because “you have to respect the beliefs of others.”

Which is kind of Pahelika in a nutshell. It’s all a bit lightweight – and not just in the sense that it’s a casual game. It is one, certainly, but it’s almost as if developers Ironcode Software applied this casualness to the entire design theory. That it’s particularly easy isn’t a problem. That it’s often rather primitive in its presentation isn’t too much of a problem. That it’s bland, contrived and often a little pretentious most definitely is.

//Doing a jig
After discovering an old inter-dimensional transporter, as you do, you’ll find yourself flitting between six different worlds in search of an all-powerful book of magic. For some reason. It’s vaguely explained, but relies a little too much on the player’s unquestioning acceptance of a legend we’re only briefly introduced to. In each of these worlds, you’ll solve a chain of incongruent puzzles that allow you to plod along through room after garden after courtyard, until you finally find the teleporter that takes you home. And then you do it all again.

The puzzles… aren’t completely awful. There’s an awful lot of pixel-hunting, and a few agonising games of guess-the-sequence, but there’s generally enough guidance not to make them a chore. Indeed, many solutions are rather straightforward, and won’t have you scratching your skull for too many minutes. They’re interrupted, though, by – of all things – jigsaw puzzles, littered around every section. Once or twice may have been fine, but when they have pretty much nothing to do with anything, they begin to grate very quickly indeed.

It all struggles to go anywhere. Interesting narrative threads disappear as soon as they turn up, and there’s no attempt to mould everything into a cohesive, flowing world. It’s a collection of puzzle rooms with a story tacked on to the beginning and the end, one that thinks it’s a lot more profound and interesting than it actually is. And though it’ll surely find its audience within the casual market, there are far better options available if that’s your cup of tea – especially if you’ve $20 to shell out.

Everyone else will find it bland, predictable, too easy and too short. Beatable in a single sitting, the whole thing just becomes deeply unsatisfying. Not terrible, but not worth it.

4/10

Ah, point and click adventures – they bring back such good memories. The amount of hours I wasted on my Atari ST trying to complete Operation Stealth, or trying to remember the code that bypassed the age test on the first Leisure Suit Larry, allowing you to see badly drawn naked ladies in their full, pixellated glory. Great fun. So I greeted Fenimore Filmore’s Revenge with a sense of nostalgia and good spirits. For the first five minutes, anyway. After that, the nostalgia and good spirits were replaced by frustration and boredom.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I expected more than a simple, linear point-and-click adventure, using no more than three simple commands (look, use, shoot) to solve puzzles (and I use the term “puzzles” very loosely there) which, when solved, reward (and I use the term “reward” very loosely there) you with cut scenes that keep skipping and lose their sound half way through. You would have thought that, after the storyline and puzzles, there wouldn’t be much to get right in a point-and-click adventure, mainly the pointing and clicking bit. But I soon grew tired of watching my little cowboy not understanding where I wanted him to go, deciding instead to spin around in a circle a few times before finally getting the gist of what I wanted him to do.

Some of the levels take the form of a third-person shooter, which seems like a bit of an afterthought that was tagged on at the end. It doesn’t work at all, and feels far too awkward to be entertaining. Even the little grammatical mistakes (“look at the Bill Carson”) give off a feeling that there has been no thought put into this game whatsoever. But the thing that really got me is how anyone can justify spending £18 on a game this poor, when only two to three hours of playing time are given back in return.

If this were a little indie game on Steam costing a couple of quid, then fair enough. But come on now. I have played some demos that aren’t much shorter than Fenimore Filmore’s Revenge. One of selling points of the game states it is a “humoristic western adventure!” but the only thing I found slightly amusing was the quality of some of the voice acting. The joke is on you if you part with your cash to buy this thing.

2/10

You always run a hefty risk with film-to-game conversions (or, in this case, book-to-film-to-game conversions), especially when you’re bouncing off a work as influential as The Godfather. Even disregarding its literary beginnings, it’s a franchise that totally epitomises a generation of filmmaking ideals, a release that paved the way for Hollywood’s previously crumbling studio system to climb back to global domination. So there’s a pretty high bar to vault over. You’re also always, without exception, going to piss off a lot of people. People who herald the original version as a universe-defining, soul-enlightening masterpiece that should never, ever be touched by anyone. When you’re making a direct sequel to something within the same medium, it’s already problematic. When you’re porting it over to a different form entirely, you’d better be ready for reactionary dynamite.

The cynic in me would say that for every stick of TNT you’ll get a big wad of cash, so it’s not exactly likely to be at the top of Electronic Arts’ list of worries. It’s also, in the scheme of things, not that important for any reason other than this one. A slow, creeping, character-led drama was never going to lend itself to a straight conversion. That’s not a big-budget, mass-audience videogame release, and I’d wager that the thousands of people who complain that they wanted something closer to the films would be lying to themselves a bit. People want explosions, fights, and the ability to drive really fast and charge down civilians. I remember someone, somewhere on the internet in the run-up to Far Cry 2’s release, asking if you could “run over zebras and chop its legs off.” That’s what we want in our games, surely. Bloodbaths of cathartic violence.

So the roots aren’t important. Suffice it to say, like the original game, The Godfather II’s similarities to the source material end with the name and a few snippets of script where relevant. That’s not a problem. This is a game, not a film, and I’d argue that trying to incessantly borrow from movie-making conventions is only going to hold this interactive medium back from potential innovation. What is a problem, though, is where EA have deemed necessary to take the fiction. In a way, I’d like to give The Godfather II the benefit of the doubt and say it’s a postmodern pastiche on ASBO culture. I don’t think that’ll stick. So we’d better look at it like this.

In The Godfather II, you’re often encouraged to beat up women.

Now, going back on everything I’ve just said and referencing the source material for a minute, wasn’t there a rather large thread in the first part of the Godfather saga involving a guy we were supposed to hate for doing just that? Yes, Carlo, his name was: a despicable character who takes joy in abusing his pregnant wife. So imagine my surprise when an early compulsory mission took me to a small bar run by an attractive young lady, and the game told me her main weakness was being punched in the face.

That’s the problem with The Godfather II. It’s not that it betrays the source material something rotten, or that there’s anything particularly broken about it. It’s just so horribly judged, through and through. In this case, the judgement seems to have been that taking Grand Theft Auto IV, adding a sprinkling of the ever-popular RPG and strategic elements, and penning a new, “mature” storyline would work. And, in a sense, it kind of does. The plot remains somewhat engrossing, even if it does occasionally take an extended cigarette break while you idly blast through a series of repetitive, loosely-connected missions. The action, though uninspired, is solid enough, and zooming around in period cars isn’t completely horrible. The strategic elements, mainly involving monitoring your finances and employing new henchmen, are perfectly functional and a pleasant enough idea. Everything works well enough in isolation – which makes it even more impressive that the experience as a whole feels like a clumsy and mildly offensive attempt to ride on the back of other people’s success. It just doesn’t quite work.

Nothing melds together to create a cohesive experience. Even the premise is maddening. You play as a mafia don… who regularly goes around behaving like an imbecilic little shit, smashing everything in his wake and generally presenting himself more like a troublesome youth than a calculated proprietor of organised crime. You’ll view myriad cut-scenes that suggest otherwise, but as far as the actual game part of the game goes, it’s all about mindless thuggery. It makes no sense.

It could have been fun. It might be, for you. Like its influences, there’s still the opportunity to ignore the main plot entirely and go on a rampage around town, stealing cars and ploughing into innocent bystanders like you’ve just graduated from some sort of vehicular crime indoctrination facility. Grand Theft Auto, even within the hard-hitting maturity of the fourth iteration, presents these segments as a respite from the rest, a chance to flex your muscles in high-powered sports cars and giggle along to the radio as citizens shout perplexingly hilarious remarks at each other before you turn them into a big blob of red gloop. In The Godfather II, when you kill an innocent bloke who just happened to amble out in front of you, people scream and cower in absolute, tangible terror. Doctors rush to their aid and attempt to resuscitate them. Onlookers cry, “what have you done?” Christ. There I was thinking mindless highway tomfoolery was a laugh.

If you get past the gut-wrenching guilt, you’ll find a series of sprawling city maps to explore. Which is a nice idea on paper, until you realise there’s no soul or character to any of the environments. I couldn’t tell you about a single location in the game, except the admittedly exciting opening sequence in Cuba. It’s all a blur. You’ll regularly find yourself driving round in circles or missing your destination completely, since everywhere looks the bloody same. It’s all brown, lifeless and disengaging. There’s not a single speck of enchantment in it.

On a more obvious gameplay note, the real issue is that, despite the added strategic “depth”, it’s not always that important to fully utilise it. You’ll have to keep one aye on your money, but the whole game is remarkably easy, meaning the tactical planning and “levelling up” seem largely irrelevant. You can send your henchmen in to do the dirty work for you, and they’ll usually come out unscathed. That’s no fun. You can go in with them, raiding every business in town, and rarely perish – and even if you do get “hospitalised” during these missions, all the game does is spring you back to the last checkpoint. Everything’s such a stroll, and it doesn’t really matter what you do in the run-up to each task. It’s completely pedestrian, and horribly monotonous.

Still, there’s an odd sense of satisfaction when you’re dangling a member of a rival family off the roof of a hotel, waiting for him to get scared enough to submit to your demands. There’s something strangely invigorating about methodically kicking in every television set in an electrical shop before the owner agrees to cough up for protection. There’s still a nagging sense of competition between the immature, comedic violence and grown-up family tragedy, one that leaves a sour and decidedly uncomfortable taste in the mouth – but hey. Not bothered about that? Sure, buy the game. You might quite like it.

But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

5/10

A weird indie art-game based on a Charles Perrault tale.  Now where have we seen that recently?

Judith is primarily impressive for being more atmospheric than most high-budget, high-tech, triple-A releases.  It looks pre-Wolfenstein – the original one – but the sense of foreboding, the deeply sinister characterisations and remarkable, haunting tragedy running through its bones are quite something.  Judith unrelentingly drags you into its world, and keeps you there until the extremely bitter end.

Judith is a game about control, the developer’s website states.  Specifically, it’s a game about losing control.  Often, this is quite literal – the game regularly drags you off in a certain direction without you needing to press any controls, increasingly as the story develops.  It all ties in.  This is a game about what happens when your every move is being defined by the actions of someone else – whether it’s searching for your lost girlfriend, or praying your murderous husband doesn’t realise you’re prying into his secrets behind his back.

Though the original premise is Perrault’s, it’s more obviously based on Bartok’s operatic adaptation, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle – without the singing, natch.  The twist is that Judith flits backwards and forwards through time something rotten, galloping admirably between the main story – the past – and a rather thought-provoking love story in the present.  It’s difficult to expose any more without obtuse spoilers, so we’ll leave this as a short little plug for a fascinating interactive experience.

A list of things you are never going to see in the world of videogames:

1. Nintendo is going to come back from the brink of hardware sales disaster and deliver the most popular home console of the generation, which will outsell both Microsoft and Sony machines despite being nowhere near as powerful.

2. Arch rivals Mario and Sonic will put their previous console wars behind them and team up for an official Olympic Games title and maybe even a sequel.

3. Nintendo will allow Rockstar to produce a fully fledged 3D interpretation of their ultra-violent, socially corrupting, sandbox-based crime spree series on the family-friendly DS system. Oh, and this entry into the Grand Theft Auto series will have a particularly strong emphasis on drug dealing.

Hold on a second…

Despite Nintendo’s console possessing a reputation for child-friendly and family-orientated games, Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar North have delivered the handheld’s most mature title to date, bringing sex, violence, drug trafficking and all the usual staples of GTA’s sandbox gameplay to the dual-screened console. Contrary to what you many may think, this is actually not the first game in the series to arrive on a Nintendo portable (both Gameboy Colour and Advance saw old school, top-down editions a la the PC and PlayStation originals) – though it still came as a shock to many that a console on which they‘re used to petting puppies and training their brains will now allow gamers to shoot down prostitutes in cold blood before venturing on a Molotov cocktail rampage. This is even more surprising because Rockstar Leeds has managed to squeeze GTA IV’s stunning version of Liberty City (albeit minus Alderney) onto a tiny DS cartridge. The result is breathtaking and is perhaps the ‘purest’ title in the series for years.

The developers have opted for a more cartoon-styled world to play out this particular tale of gang warfare, very much in keeping with the comic-book look of the series’ loading screens and box art. This is probably as much to do with the limited capability of the console as it is artistic license, but the result is an incredible rendition of the GTA universe. You’ll also notice that the action is viewed from a much higher angle than in previous 3D versions – again, probably to avoid the issues of poor draw distance caused by the lack of horsepower under the bonnet. From static screenshots this can give the impression that the gameplay will be much closer to the original top-down games of the 32 bit era, but once the game is seen in motion you realise that this is no backwards step; this is indeed a complete 3D Grand Theft Auto experience on your DS despite the clever design choices used to disguise the hardware limitations.

Hardware limitations however aren’t what define the grade-A titles on Nintendo’s handheld. It’s the hardware innovations that count, and in this particular field Rockstar have excelled themselves. One of the biggest criticisms aimed at GTA over the years has been the repetitive nature of the core missions on offer; drive to point A, kill person B, escape to point C and repeat to final credits. By utilising the unique aspects of the console, the developers have breathed new life into the tried and tested mission structure. Arming bombs, hotwiring cars, constructing sniper rifles and hacking security systems can all pop up in the middle of a task and involve simple yet satisfying use of the touch screen. Even hailing a taxi has a new twist, requiring the player to whistle at their console before climbing aboard. These features, which many people – myself included – thought would be a throwaway gimmick, actually prove to immerse the player further into the Liberty City underworld and succeed in providing a much wider variety of missions than in any previous title in the series.

The story revolves around Huang Lee who arrives in Liberty City from China to deliver Yu Jian – a priceless sword he inherited following his father’s murder – to his uncle, a local Triad boss. Before you can say Niko Bellić, Huang is attacked, his sword stolen and he’s locked in a car that’s been pushed into the river. After a touch screen-based escape, the standard GTA story unfolds, with plenty of twists and turns and the razor-sharp wit fans have grown to expect. While that’s all very enjoyable, it’s also something of a let down. Grand Theft Auto IV pushed the boundaries of what can be achieved through the power of a well-written script, brilliantly delivered dialogue and a truly compelling story. Chinatown Wars has had to ditch the voice acting set to well-directed, real-time cut scenes in favour of static, comic book-esque visuals with subtitles, and a narrative that fails to even come close to its predecessor in terms of both scope and level of emotional involvement. But then again, it never actually tries to rope you in on an emotional level. Chinatown Wars is quite happy to use its tale of Liberty City’s criminal underbelly to simply entertain and lead the player onto the next action-packed mission, and that is by no means a bad thing – especially when what is there can be hysterically funny.

If the manner in which the story is presented in this iteration of the GTA universe can be considered a step backwards, then the same could easily be levied at the way in which the game plays. This is a frantic action game just like the original title, but reworked to include all of the brilliance of the games since they went 3D. Backwards it may be, but its one hell of a lot of fun. It’s the perfect blend of gameplay styles which suits the medium of handheld gaming down to the ground. Missions are short and focused for when you’re just sneaking in a quick five minute burst of DS time, but the city is still there for exploring should you have a spare hour or ten. All of the usual GTA distractions are present; taxis, police cars, ambulances and fire trucks can all be hijacked in order to make some quick cash, as well as a few new side missions such as a Chinese takeaway delivery service and a tattoo parlour (yet more touch screen fun). You’ll need all the money you can get from these tasks as life’s pretty tough for Huang when he first arrives in town, and completing the main story missions doesn’t really pay all that well. If you want to be able to afford a stockpile of weapons and armour, you’re going to have to find a faster way of making money – and what better way to do that in Liberty City, than via the sincere and honest tradition of drug dealing?

The drug dealing side to Chinatown Wars is far from a side-mission or extra mini-game. It’s an integral part of the title and throws up a whole new ‘economic-narcotic-management-sim’ slant on the overall gameplay. The idea behind it is simple enough: drug dealers can be found throughout the city. Buy and sell when the prices are right in order to maximise your profits. Easy. Just don’t get caught.

You’ll be given tip-offs regarding which dealers are buying and selling certain drugs through your PDA system, which serves to replicate GTA IV’s mobile phone as your in-game menu system. It’s all arranged brilliantly using the touch screen and also allows you to check your email on the move, use the GPS to see where you’re going and you can even order more weapons through the Ammunation website which will be handily delivered to your nearest safe house.

As with just about every title in the series, however, there is one absolute star of the show who steals the spotlight and truly pulls you into the game world. In this case, it is of course Liberty City. A sandbox of this size and with this much detail really shouldn’t be possible on the DS. This is an open-world so gritty and believable that simply driving around and exploring all it has to offer can rob you of hours at a time. Anyone who has played through Niko Bellić’s story will feel instantly at home: while this isn’t a street for-street-replication of GTA IV’s Liberty City, it’s a very faithful representation with just about every landmark and point of interest you’d hope to see included all present and accounted for. This is a masterful achievement, one that’s worth the entrance fee alone.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is an incredible addition to the series. It heavily acknowledges what has gone before it, taking the best elements of both its 2D and 3D predecessors whilst breaking new boundaries with its clever use of the DS hardware and the drug dealing management side to the game. While the story fails to touch the high watermark left by it’s home console cousin, avoiding any attempt to affect the player emotionally, it does manage to raise a smile now and then and succeeds in driving the action forwards towards it’s fantastic Mexican standoff finale. There is so much depth to this game I can’t believe it’s on a handheld system – and I’ve not even mentioned the brilliant new police chases, or the rival gang bases, street races, buying new safe houses, scratch cards, stunt jumps, security cameras… This list really could go on and on. When you’ve closed your DS mid-game, for example, re-opening it causes a shout of, “D’you wanna piece of ma pie?” Genius.

So here’s something I really never expected to see in the world of videogames. The best game on a Nintendo system doesn’t feature Mario or Zelda; it’s not even a first-party title. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is without doubt the finest game available for the DS. It’s adult, violent, shocking and crude, but above all else it’s an absolute riot. Isn’t that what carjacking, drug dealing and shooting hookers is all about?

9/10

I always bite my nails a bit when a beloved franchise ventures into the videogame world.  Since the duo originally made their way to the moon in 1989, Wallace & Gromit has played an intrinsic part in my love of animation.  A series of point and click adventures by the lovely Telltale Games is about as safe as it could get, but still.  Nerves shattered, y’know?

Fortunately, and astonishingly, they got it spot on.  Not in a game design sense, and not necessarily even in a scriptwriting sense.  Some of the jokes are a little stunted, some of the puzzles a little convoluted.  But in every way that matters, Fright of the Bumblebees is the perfect Wallace & Gromit game.  That’s for one reason, and one reason alone: it’s Wallace & Gromit.  And that’s just grand.

Every detail is superb.  From the fingerprint marks on the models’ surfaces, to Gromit’s cynical glances to camera, every inch of Ardman’s TV show has been replicated to an incredible degree.  There’s no Peter Sallis, traditional voice of Wallace, but the filthy imposter does a damn good job of impersonating his Mancunian inflections.  That typical Northern English charm absolutely dominates Fright of the Bumblebees.  I could barely have hoped for anything more.

Sure, I could have hoped for slightly better puzzle design.  Only slightly, though, and the occasionally frustrating lateralism makes a fair bit of sense in this context.  Wallace is renowned for his barmy inventions, and everything follows the same logic as the source material.  Once you’ve remembered how the pair’s crazy life functions, everything slots nicely into place, and it’s a pleasant stroll to the finale.  This first episode is only a few hours long, and you’re only likely to stumble on a couple of the puzzles, but it’s important to remember this is only an introduction.  If Telltale can keep the quality this high, they’re on to a winner.

The story does need a kick up the rear, meandering frustratingly throughout Fright of the Bumblebees, but it does have the courtesy to pick up pace by the end.  Considering the ingeniously silly ideas conjured up for the TV shows, the ones on offer here do feel a little lightweight.  The jokes don’t all quite work, either – it’s occasionally very funny, but only occasionally, the rest falling slightly short.  Still chuckle-inducing, but nothing more.

No matter.  I don’t care.  What’s important is that Wallace & Gromit has been translated to the PC entirely intact.  It shows tremendous talent and dedication on the part of an American company to recreate something so quintessentially English.  Telltale have done so remarkably, and while Fright of the Bumblebees isn’t quite revolutionarily brilliant, there are still three episodes to go. I can’t wait to see where this preposterous partnership venture next.

7/10