Movie Review: Collateral

*This review contains some minor spoilers*

There are two ingredients I've noticed are almost always present in good Thriller films, and I think they're the fundamental difference between a Thriller and an Action film - theme and tension.

Action films are a genre that I personally find tedious and stale the great majority of the time. Musclebound stars making tiresome quips as they mow down Faceless Baddie #79451 get me frowning. Even more so when the plot can usually be summed up in three words. Man gets revenge. Man kills things. Manmade gratuitous explosions.

That's all old tat. So back to Thrillers and themes.

To use an example: No Country For Old Men, a thriller that holds a fond place in my heart, has themes which encompass greed, guilt, the breakdown of social morals and fate. These themes combine with a terrifying use of tension to create an edge-of-seat experience. Guns don't fire every five seconds, but when they do it almost always means a character we care about is in dire peril.

Collateral is a similar film, in that although it does have action-filled scenes, it also cranks up the tension, and focuses on characterisation far more than gunfire and explosions.

Don't make him angry

Set in L.A., the plot primarily features cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx), who has been planning for a long time to start his own Limousine business, but somehow has never got around to it. Early in the film he meets a high-profile lawyer named Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) when she rides in the back of his cab.

It's clear the two like each other, but unlike many films, where vulgar lines start getting hurled around immediately, the scene comes across as pretty natural and realistic. The two simply chat and get on well. Max starts to become a character we can empathise with, due to both a good script and an admirable performance from Foxx.

Annie leaves him with her card and departs. The next fare Max has is a strange man named Vincent (Tom Cruise), who dresses in a sharp suit, but sports a messy stubbled look. He is friendly, but also cynical of human nature.

He tells a story of a man dying on the LA metro, and his corpse only being noticed six hours later despite passengers sitting next to him in all that time. This theme of social apathy and urban dehumanisation continues throughout the film, even influencing the plot at several key points.

It soon turns out that Vincent is a hired killer, and a good one at that. I'm not usually a huge fan of Tom Cruise, but here he plays Vincent perfectly. He is both disturbingly cold and yet endearingly animated at the same time, striking a mix between likable intelligence and frightening ruthlessness.

Vincent offers Max $600 to drive him to several different spots around the city. Max drops him off at an apartment first, and then is horrified when a body suddenly lands on top of the taxi from a window above.

Vincent is quite calm, and forces Max at gunpoint to clean the taxi and stow the corpse in the boot of the car.

From there on the film proceeds at a menacing but measured pace, with Max strongarmed into taking Vincent to the rest of his victims. Following the trail of bodies is LAPD officer Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), who believes members of the FBI are wrong to suspect Max as the murderer.

Between killings Vincent and Max talk to each other in the car, and gradually more is revealed about both. Unexpected and very tense scenes occur. One has the police pulling over the taxi for its broken windscreen.

Another has the duo meeting a jazz club owner (Barry Shabaka Henley) and having an intriguing (and very sad) conversation.

In a particularly good scene, Max is required to pose as Vincent to Vincent's criminal client Felix (Javier Bardem). He explains they've never met him in person before, and so Max can take his place if he can improvise well enough. If not, they'll probably kill him. Either way Vincent is able to sit safely outside in the car.

Javier Bardem is a very skilled actor. In No Country For Old Men, he put in an iconic performance as the unstoppable psychotic Anton Chigurh.

Here, in his portrayal of the laid back but intimidating Felix, he switches instantly from friendly chit-chat to weighting every word with solid malice.

"If Santa Claus were to make a list...and [his assistant] were to lose it...how f***ing furious do you  think Santa Claus would be?"

From there on the film ploughs ahead, with several surprising twists. The film manages to remain firmly in the realm of plausibility. There is a car crash not followed by an explosion, something which stunned me.

In fact, I don't think the film contains any explosions, and it's a very refreshing change indeed.

Vincent is one of the most interesting movie 'villains' I have seen in a recent film. His rationalisation of his job ("Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space.") raises some very interesting questions on morality. Does morality even exist in a purely atheist, scientific outlook on life, or is Vincent simply a sociopath? Why does it matter, ultimately?

The ending is a final release of the tension throughout the movie, and neatly sums up the themes in the film as things seem to go full-circle.

Final Word:

I went into Collateral expecting your typical crappy explosion fest, but left with a satisfied smile on my face. The film balances action with a fresh cast of characters and a plot that really does introduce some interesting questions. Performances all around are solid.

I'm going to give the film 5 stars, not because it is perfect (no film is), but because it is a very entertaining piece of cinema.

One thing I noticed throughout the film was the pleasing lack of swearing. F-bombs are dropped, but they are not generally used in casual conversation, and not to anywhere near the level I've seen in other films recently. It's amazing how much more impact they have when they're not coming out of someone's mouth every two seconds. Definitely a plus.

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5/5

RTS Games: Atmosphere

So I've rehooked myself on the strategy game Dawn of War II lately, and am enjoying it a lot when I get time to grab a match.

Relic Games seem to have a great knack for making very immersive, exciting strategy games. In the days of old, playing Command and Conquer, real time strategy games were fun, but not really all that visceral.

That changed with Dawn of War, an RTS from Relic based on the Warhammer 40k world. I've never been a tabletop gamer myself (and in fact, the game was my introduction to the whole W40k thing), but Relic managed to bring the subject matter to intense life.

In DoW, your units were no longer generic pixellated tanks that just muttered "K." when you clicked a button.

Space Marines screamed "For the Emperor!" as they ploughed knife-first into crowds of Chaos Cultists. The Imperial Guard Assassin droned "One shot...is all I need..." in hushed monotone as he slaughtered enemies from afar.

Chaos, by contrast, had you leading an army of reckless psychotics. Chaos Marines burst out laughing at random intervals, muttered "Yeeeeessss!" and started twitching even when just standing around.

The Chaos tank driver was my personal favourite. His gravelly yell of "After a thousand battles, one only sees DEATH!" was a pleasure to behold.

The arrogant Eldar gloated smugly as they vapourised thuggish Orks, and Orks provided a really great comedic boost.

Firing a machinegun isn't all that funny, but a big, stupid muscly green thing firing a poorly made machinegun and shouting "Don't touch da teef! I want da teef!" tends to raise a smile.

One huge leap forward was that units could enter melee, and would actually fight each other in hand to hand combat rather than just stand there as in  many other previous strategy games. 

Then there was Company of Heroes after DoW, a WWII RTS game that balanced humour with grim violence delicately and respectfully. CoH added situational dialogue and music along with sound effects that raised the bar for RTS immersion.

Music at the start of the game would be quiet with an ominous tinge as you began to mobilise your troops. Soldiers would chat casually as you moved them around the map.

Then you'd run into an enemy MG42 team hiding in a house, and suddenly the music became a frenzied orchestra. The guns roar, bullets whizz and thud and your men hurl profanities as they lie down in a ditch. You move back to base to send out more guys, and can hear the first squad screaming for help through the radio. Intense to say the least.

Dawn of War II takes the best intense bits of CoH and the great factions of DoW, and splices them together to create a game that is grin-inducing fun even when you're getting completely hammered - a quality that is as rare in games as it is welcome.

Being A Dickhead's Cool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVmmYMwFj1I

Found this video this morning, and I laugh just thinking of it!

I was under the impression that I was the only person in the world who thought all these people wearing mismatched clothes and "hard man" tattoos were, to put it plainly, twats.

Apparently though, there are other sane people out there too :P

Mirror's Edge - Plot Grievances

 *Contains major spoilers.*

So, I just finished quickly replaying Mirror's Edge, and I thought to do the game justice, I would briefly go over why exactly the story creates such a frustrating experience for me.

There were two main things that annoyed me:

A: Overuse of animated cutscenes. They muddle the plot considerably.
B: Important plot points left hanging in mid air.

Plot Irritant 1 - "The Assassin Plotline" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To quickly summarise, the main character, Faith, has a sister, Kate, who is framed by shady forces for killing a mayoral candidate (the "good" candidate who wanted to reverse the evil regime. Blah blah.).

Now, you spend about 3/4 of the game trying to find out who killed him to help out Kate, including multiple levels where you chase an athletic masked figure, who later is revealed to be the assassin.

This assassin turns out to be a close friend of Faith, a fellow Runner named Celeste who became a traitor.

Okay, I'm thinking, the scene is set for some kind of real, concrete resolution of that plot point now, right? Well, it would seem so. You grab Celeste's gun and have an extended martial arts fight at the end of one level. It ends with you pinning her to the floor.

That's when things turn weird. Apparently the developers didn't think this was dramatic enough.

Suddenly the game cuts to an animated cutscene, which abruptly shows Celeste wriggling free and stumbling away. Again. Then Faith magically appears in front of her (?!) apparently being faster now that she's beaten Cel up a bit. Regardless Cel suddenly produces a second handgun from her belt (Wtf? She can just summon guns from air?) and threatens Faith.

Then bad guys arrive and begin shooting at them both (the same bad guys Cel works for...riiight), allowing Faith to grab the gun and kill them in a ridiculous explosion. Then, as the smoke clears, Faith walks off, dropping the gun, and Cel is nowhere to be seen. Faith doesn't comment on this, she just mutters that she's off to save her sister, and the guy on the radio to her says that he "heard all [he] needed to."

And that's all that's mentioned of Cel. Presumably they're keeping her as a villain in the sequel or something, but seriously...3/4 of the game devoted to catching her, then she just vanishes? And in an extremely lame way, with none of the characters being at all interested in finally finishing her off? Sigh. Welcome to Mirror's Edge, where things don't have to make sense!

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Plot Irritant 2 - The Schizophrenic Police Lieutenant

This one's simple. There's a CPF (the original "good" city police) officer named Miller who through the whole game alternates every animated cutscene or two between helping you and being a dick.

In one (pointlessly animated) cutscene, he arranges to meet Faith, and then jams a gun in her face while talking. In another, he is seen talking with a major bad guy. Then, at the end of the game, he shoots two mercs attacking you and suddenly goes massively out of his way to help you.

I guess they did this to keep the player guessing, but it ended up making me so unsure of his character that I just wanted him to help out or die.

Obviously the same writer who worked on Cel finished this part of the plot - we never even get to know what happened to him, we just hear an ambiguous gunshot as he talks mid-sentence over the radio. Then we don't hear from him again.

Another classy cliffhanger bloody annoying ending!

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Plot Irritant 3 - The Absolutely Ludicrous Ending

This is by far the most bemusing part of the game. Kate is to be executed, and the bad guys also want Faith dead.

So naturally, when the last major baddie has Kate at gunpoint, and Faith at his mercy, he kills both of them.

Wait sorry, that would make sense, what am I thinking?!. No, what I meant to say, is he doesn't do anything except talk for ages! Yeah, that's more like it.

Then he bundles Kate onto a chopper (which is going to Loltown or something. It's never explained) and a load of SWAT guys with machineguns run up behind the unarmed Faith.

What happens next? Well, the bad guy says something cheesy like "Sometimes you have to jump Faith." He then starts shooting at Faith from the hovering Chopper, and the 4-5 SWAT guys also begin shooting.

Why he didn't shoot earlier doesn't matter, and neither does the fact that Faith can dodge 5 machineguns at once from about two metres away. She's FAITH!11one!

Anyway, then the "WTF" factor is suddenly dialled to 5000. Faith leaps into the helicopter (which is about 1-2 metres off of the roof) and kicks the big bad out of it to his death. Then the helicopter starts to crash because the SWAT guys' bullets hit it (lol) and so Faith grabs her sister and throws her out (o_0).


Then Faith leaps out of the chopper, which is spinning at about 400 miles per hour, and lands on the roof as it blows up. She then hugs her sister, and the two stare out at the city as the camera zooms out and soft music starts.


Processed all that yet? No, I haven't either!


In the review I mentioned a stupid deus ex machina ("from nowhere") plot resolution. What was that? Well, remember those SWAT guys firing hundreds of bullets seconds ago from the roof? When Faith and Kate hug on the roof as the chopper blows up, they're suddenly gone.


That's right, a whole squad of gun-toting bad guys about to kill the heroines all just cease to exist in the ending moments of the game with no explanation at all. What. The. Crap.


Plot Irritant 4 - What was the point? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So the game ends with a logic-defying ending, two major characters with totally unknown fates, and the radio guy who helps you all game (Mercury) dead in a brief animated cutscene.

Mercury was quite possibly the one no-BS, fully-developed character in the game that I rooted for, other than Faith herself. And he gets shot off-screen and dies in a 20 second long piece of abrupt animation.

The last thing he says is "No 'sorrys', Faith. Just don't let them win."


From that quote I assumed the end of the game would have Faith bringing the evil government crashing down, or liberating the city, or some massive event of vengeance. Instead she saves her sister, disappears a SWAT team with magic, and that's about it. Evil empire lives. City doesn't change. Merc is unavenged. Half the cast has vanished.


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So if anyone is actually still reading after this extended rant, I think really my overwhelming feeling is of disappointment. ME is a game that really feels great in places, but it's like somewhere things got cut out or rushed, and the last half or so of the story got thrown together as a result.


Gameplay videos coming soon.

Review and Analysis: 28 Days Later

*Contains spoilers*

As a Brit horror film, and one with some interesting concepts at that, 28 Days Later is a movie I want to lavish with praise.

Unfortunately, it's a good film in parts, but it can never seem to fully scramble over that wall to solid, consistent quality. It comes close to having some really poignant and creepy moments, and then shoots itself in the foot with some really bizarre and crippling plot and logic flaws.

It's a significant step above films like The Hills Have Eyes, which don't even try to pretend that they're not rehashing old cliches, yet it gets stuck in third gear somewhere along the way.

This film was one of the (if not THE) first to feature "fast zombies". As if being set upon by hordes of shambling zombies wasn't bad enough, 28 DL features living humans infected with a virus that is like Rabies on crack. Victims generally become very violent and sprint around screaming. On top of that, even a droplet of infected blood is enough to convert you. These are all ideas that crank up the creepiness in a genre that generally sticks to the beaten track. Good start!

Let's continue through the plot.

Things look promising as the main character, Jim, wakes after a traffic accident...only to find the hospital he is in is completely empty. There are many haunting shots of Jim wandering around London, which is equally deserted, an apocolyptic event apparently occuring 28 days before he awoke.

Of course it is gradually revealed that the Rage virus (freed from lab animals in the intro) has decimated the UK in that time.

Here is my first minor niggling logic irritation. Maybe the military cleared some of the corpses away before they got overrun, but how come there are only about three dead people on all of London's streets? Why are the motorways almost TOTALLY empty in this film? Surely there would be some kind of mass panic, and they would be jammed with cars and bodies?

I can overlook that though, because the imagery is intriguing. Fair enough, artistic liberty and all that.

Soon Jim startles a bunch of Infected, and meets up with Serena and Mark, two other survivors who are apparently geared up for fighting. They save his hide. Serena seems cold and efficient, Mark is a little warmer to Jim.

They go see Jim's parents the next day, and find that they died relatively peacefully, commiting suicide by pills some time ago.

Infected break into the house and attack Mark, who Serena mercilessly kills with a big knife before he even starts changing. It's left ambiguous as to whether he was actually infected, or she was just being paranoid, but presumably it's the former.

Moving on, Serena and Jim are chased into an abandoned apartment block, where they meet Frank and his daughter, Hannah.

Now, this is logic flaw number 2, and it's harder to pass this off as artistic license instead of poor writing/horror cliche. Frank fends off the Infected by defending the stairs of the apartment as Serena and Jim go into the flat.

Frank competently holds them off. He's wearing full police riot gear and has a baton. Sensible man! My goodness, did I just praise a horror character for being clever? What madness is this?

Of course, good things can't last. When the gang decides that they are running out of food and must leave the apartment, Frank leaves wearing a T-Shirt, and doesn't bother to take the baton either. Double-you-tee-eff.

It's about this point that the film goes into the second half, and I find my previous 4-star plus opinion wavering considerably as the writing starts to go a little nuts.

Firstly, we have the gang driving up to a road. There are two routes - one through a pitch-black tunnel, and one through a safer route. They decide to take the tunnel, because it is faster. Okay, it's not sensible, but at least there is an explanation. They enter the tunnel with grim looks of determination.

Then, driivng through the tunnel, and bouncing over bits of wrecked cars, they start laughing. Yes, you read that right. Laughing. Why, I don't know. Presumably it was meant to be that kind of "relief" laughter, juxtaposed with the tension before the scene.

Unfortunately they didn't really carry that off, because I was left totally confused as to why they were all laughing like morons as they drove over wrecked cars and corpses. Regardless, they idiotically wreck their tyres while doing this and have to get new transport. They also get attacked in the tunnel. Totally didn't see that coming.

Now, from here on Frank gets infected, shares a quick speech to his daughter, and is then shot to death by the military. He gets infected in a stupid way - shouting at a bird eating a corpse, which then drips blood into his eye as it moves off.

I'd be terrified of being infected in that situation, so you could count me cautious of blood and dead bodies. In this film though, running over to corpses and aggravating feasting birds is the clever thing to do.

Here is where the final act really plummets off a cliff. Any subtlety the film has is abandoned now, and we learn the soldiers were just luring survivors to exploit them rather than help them. The Major in charge explains: "I promised them women!"

Yes, that's correct. The soldiers have been fighting for less than a full month, and they have become insane women-craving lunatics with insatiable libido. WTF.

Since Brit soldiers have been fighting in Afghanistan for 8 years without developing a tendency to hump anything that moves, I really don't understand why in this film apparently it makes sense for trained men to go nuts in 28 days.

Of course, the Major, with all his years of army experience, doesn't just tell his men to stop acting like dicks, he promises them women. Sighface.

Needless to say there is much gratuitous violence, the soldiers die, and the gang escapes Britain. The end.

Final Word:

A really intriguing first and second act is sadly ruined as it falls into the realm of stupid plot devices in the second half. The film attempts to show that "Man is the real villain", but instead totally discredits the tension and atmosphere built earlier in the film.

My one tip to horror movie developers - don't cheat. What I mean is, if Frank had worn the riot armour for the second half of the movie, but been killed anyway, that would have been cool. It would have preserved the atmosphere and made sense.

The fact such an apparently important item suddenly disappears just to make the group more vulnerable in later scenes takes an axe to everything that makes a horror film good.

Rating: 3 out of 5

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Review: Mirror's Edge (PC)

So, today I decided to redownload my copy of Mirror's Edge from Steam after not playing it for a while, and that got me thinking on doing a review.

ME is a funny game. It's innovative, and that is its one key strength.

The gameplay revolves around parkour, the practice of moving physically around an area (particular urban locales) in the fastest and most efficient way possible. The first thing (and this always irritates me!) - it IS parkour, not "free running", as many people believe.

Parkour is all about efficiency of movement by climbing, running and jumping. Free running is all about leaping off of railings and doing flips as you move around to wow people. It is the "Whoah, duuuuude!" version of parkour.

ME does the whole parkour thing really well. The whole game is played from a first person viewpoint, as the character of Faith, a female "runner". Maybe I should explain that.

In the not-so-distant future, society has apparently become a utopian place. People live in huge, gleaming, permanently bright and sunny cities, decorated in almost obsessively eye-catching colours.

Underneath the pleasant exterior, the unnamed city the game is set in (and apparently the world at large) is micro-managed by a despotic regime that forbids free travel of information, and thus keeps the populace happy through apathy and ignorance.

Runners, male and female couriers of information, leap around this cityscape using parkour, delivering messages and data, trying to restore more free will to the citizens and/or start some kind of revolution. As one character says, things were better "when the city was dirty and alive".

The game's story, surprisingly for such an interesting concept, is one of it's weakest elements. It starts out pretty good, but drags on without really coughing up anything really interesting. Several characters in the game change their motives multiple times, sometimes giving the feeling that the story has gone one or two twists too far.

The ending in particular is weak (it has a rather lame deus ex machina element to it). It leaves the game at a real cliffhanger, and gave me the feeling that ultimately I had solved nothing, and made no difference during the game. Not cool.

The first person view really gives the game a "realistic" feel, despite the almost surreal surroundings of the city. You hurl yourself over walls, slide under pipes, crash through doors and kick guns from the hands of your pursuers all in first person. That means that you will literally have the camera roll over vertically when performing a commando roll, for example.

It sounds nauseating, but you soon get used to it, and it is very cool.

I mentioned guns, and that means combat. It is the one thing that drags the gameplay down, particularly in the later sections. The fun of the game largely relies on the unique movement. Building up momentum and performing a death-defying leap onto a roof is very satisfying, particularly when you look back and the chasing corporate cronies can only stare helplessly as you get away.

Unfortunately the game feels the need to crank the shooting up to 11, something that has ruined many innovative games. You find in the later levels you won't be jumping or running much - instead you'll be walking down corridors gunning down hordes of SWAT-like baddies.

That's okay if you're playing a dedicated first person shooter, but although the gunplay mechanics in ME are pretty good, they're not A+. You'll soon yearn for the freedom of running away from the guns rather than just walking around shooting Identikit Evil Man #04430 in the face.

The hand to hand combat is more exciting, and early game you'll definitely enjoy surprising the odd sluggish bad guy with a flying kick to the gob.


Finally, the game has a really interesting graphical style. The city is unnaturally clean and bright. The colours both guide you (a form of "runner sense" allows you to quickly pick out a door you can bash through, for example, by colouring it eye-searing red) and decorate the environment beautifully.

Enemies and other characters look pretty realistic, yet strangely "perfect" at the same time, much like the city. Their eyes gleam with light reflections, and armour, clothes and skin designs are top notch.


Final Word:


If you're tired of shoot-a-thon games where the colour palette seems to consist entirely of grey, brown, and brown/red, then ME will give your eyes and senses a much needed holiday.

Overall I recommend the game. Time trials tasks give the game replayability, and if you can ignore the increasingly silly turns of the story (and stomach the shootier levels at the end of the game) you should find the glowing jewel of the open gameplay shines through.

I give the game 3.5 (rounded to 4) out of 5 for really being bold and attempting something new, even though it does have flaws.

At certain times, when the gameplay really flows, it's easy to grin like a maniac. Being chased through a brightly coloured subway station as trains hurtle by was a perfect example of a level I thought was really fun to play.

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Online Accounts and Patience

*Readers should be aware that I was in a bad mood while typing this. Any such posts will be tagged with "Ragepost". Swearing and sadistic remarks may be at above average levels.*

I hate computers.

I was rather hoping that all my game-related bile had dried up from yesterday's prolonged outburst at DLC. Unfortunately not, as an infuriating experience this morning has proved.

What is it with games (and for that matter, other online services too) having ridiculous account systems that make the user fly through freaking hoops just to do the simplest things?

Ages ago, I enjoyed playing Company of Heroes, a WW-II themed real-time strategy game, made by developer Relic. Then I bought the expansion, Opposing Fronts, and much fun (read: swearing) occurred while I faffed about trying to get the two products to work in harmony due to the game's bizarre online account system.

Recently, after a long absense from the game, I picked up the mini-expansion, Tales of Valour (I refuse to spell it the American way!) for a sweet £2.50 deal on Steam.

Right, I'm thinking, just fire up Opposing Fronts, key in the ToV code from my steam purchase, and everything should work. I can have a brief game against the AI, play with shiny things, done.

No, of course it is never that simple. I'm greeted with the Relic Online login screen. I've long since forgotten my account, so I get the piece of paper I wrote it down on (after forgetting it once in the past and having a massive pain in the neck).

Login! Oh wait, I can't, because it tells me the details are wrong. They can't be, since I haven't changed them since writing them down. That means that the game needs to be patched before it will recognise my login details.

This leads to a lengthy attempt at installing a small 26mb patch through the game's updater.

Does that work? No prizes for the answer. I open all the router ports the game requires for updating, to absolutely no avail. It just tells me that the download failed. No reason or anything, natch.

I then sod around for about 45 minutes (no exaggeration, I've been sat here for a full hour now) Googling how to actually find the patch version of the game, so I can manually update it, and then perform that. Naturally that required this weird "Cancel download to get up prompt for disc validation." dance.

Excuse me, but how the bloody hell am I meant to know cancelling the download instead of just letting it fail will let me validate my game with the disc?! Why is there no "use disc" button? /tearhairout.

Apparently all this assorted bollocks is in place to provide an easier experience for the user. Since that is obviously rubbish (having to download at least 10 patches does not equal user friendliness), it is clearly a purely anti-piracy measure. Got to love how those have a tendency to screw up the experience for legitimate customers only.

I'm pretty sure the pirates don't even have a login screen on their version, so no need to bull around with all this kind of rubbish, plus they get the game free.

Nice job gaming industry, nice job!

Games and "Downloadable Content"

There is a new marketing technique taking gaming by storm. It is called "Downloadable Content", or DLC.

Consoles have been doing this since the XBox 360, but it's something that is now slowly creeping it's way into the PC sector.

First of all, I'm not against all forms of DLC. In the past there were always expansion packs for games that you could buy in a store to add new stuff. They typically added quite a bit of new gameplay or story. Fallout 3's DLC generally has a good reputation as it adds a lot of content, and the original game was well made.

What I am definitely against, however, is this new tide of "bullcrap DLC". Games developers have recently been making a game with a lot of content, cutting a lot of that original content out, and then re-selling it after release as DLC packs, often for £5 or more per purchase.

Alternatively they deliberately build the game around some kind of minor but irritating flaw (such as a poor ending or lack of weapons), and then bring out DLC almost immediately after release that "fixes" that problem.

Deliberately gimping your product, mis-selling it, and then re-selling lumps of it strikes me as a pretty unethical business practice and I'm surprised the companies in question are even allowed to do it legally.

Take Mafia II for example. In trailers for the game, several missions (complete with dialogue, fully rendered cutscenes and everything else) are totally missing. There are no "side-missions", but simply a main story that winds through the length of the game (which works well since the story is strong, but it still feels as though something was cut out.)

Then, a couple of days back, after the game has only been out about a week at most, suddenly the developers (2K) released a DLC pack, currently priced at £6.30 on Steam. Now, I only just paid £29.99 for the game, there is no way I'm dropping £6.30 less than a week later.

This pack is called Jimmy's Vendetta, and features a bald mercenary out for revenge. The pack is apparently far more "arcade" in nature, and features 30 tasks that have you racing around the city shooting enemies and blowing stuff up.

Thirty may sound a lot, but the whole extra content pack can apparently be finished in around 40 minutes, the tasks are so short.

Short missions with an arcadey feel? That sounds almost like the side-missions that seemed "cut" from the game!

2k vehemently denied this, insisting everything was new content that they'd freshly made (in a week, lolz). They dug their own grave with that one. In the (new) apartment in which Jimmy stays, screenshots clearly show the name "Vito" (the standard game character) engraved on the apartment ownership sign. Oops!

Honestly, if you paid for a delicious burger, would you expect a big bite out of the meat inside? And then you're told that you'll have to pay extra to have that chunk back, in a slightly different form?

Since Mafia II's ending is left very ambiguous (someone even joked that the next DLC will feature "The ending and an epilogue.") I wouldn't be surprised if they're going to release a crap-ton of missions for Vito for £6 a pop soon as well.

Someone even spotted a future pack named "Joe's Adventures" in the game files - Joe being a character that the ending hinges around.

It's not unique to Mafia II either.

Fallout 3, while generally regarded as having very good value DLC, also had a remarkably crappy "standard" ending that prevented you playing on with your established character. Many fans were annoyed by this.

Presumably the decision was made to deliberately make it quite a closed ending let down, because the next DLC pack suddenly changed it to an open-ended "keep-playing" ending. *Insert cash register sound*.

Meanwhile CoD:Modern Warfare 2 has been charging £10.99 for maps already in the original game, just ported over to the sequel in 5 minutes. You have to be joking.

Steam is also telling me that "Sniper: Ghost Warrior" (which admittedly I've never played) is now charging £9.99 for 5 new multiplayer maps. Call me crazy, but the whole game was £29.99 I believe.

So 5 new maps (for which only the mapping and artistic parts of a dev crew need to work on) cost 1/3 of the original price? Lol.

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I think the only way to stop this pretty cynical cash-cow esque technique of selling every last drop of a game is to stop buying the lamest of the DLC packs.

Sadly time and time again gamers have proven that they don't have the will to take such an action, and I imagine it will be several years before it becomes such a rip-off that most of the public stop buying it.

Until then, I'll bitterly enjoy watching people spend £6 for a new gun/hat/car for Vito.

Sturm Von Stahl BB League Week 1 Report

So for Season 6 of the online Blood Bowl league I play in I decided to do a  "video-comic" match report.

I spliced in-game sounds into the mix and hopefully it will be reasonably enjoyable even to those who don't play the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6zoRHbmPWU

Youtube was kind enough to desynch the sound about halfway in onwards, but meh.

There are a few lame in-jokes there. One in particular is that for some reason it always seems to look like my guys are getting hit in the nuts when I take screenshots :\

I've had several matches since then, but unfortunately real life got a little crazy a few weeks back and so far I've been unable to give them the same treatment. All in good time, with a little bit of luck.