Game Review - Deus Ex: Human Revolution

He never asked to be born a badass. It just happened.

One of your first missions in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is to thwart a hostage situation at one of your boss's subsidiary companies. Not so difficult; just get in there, shoot the bad guys, rescue the good guys and go home right? Well, yeah, it can be that simple, or it can be as complicated as you want it to be.

Not feeling up to busting down the front door and gunning down everyone between you and the hostages? That's fine because there's an entrance on the rooftop that'll make it easy for you to get the drop on them. But maybe you're not feeling up to using your gun either? That's fine, too, because if you're real quiet, you can sneak around and crawl through some air vents to get to where the hostages are being held. Oh, but there are a few guys blocking your way and you're not so sure you can sneak around them. Well, there's always your tranquilizer rifle! Shoot one of them in the face, watch his buddies run to his aid, and then sneak around to the elevator.

Wham, bam, you're at the hostages... But maybe you don't feel like rescuing these hostages. Maybe that gas bomb they're stuck with is a little too close to hitting zero, and your hacking skills aren't as keen as you'd like them to be. Maybe you don't want to die, not on your first goddamn mission. So you run, you get your ass out of there and hear the hostages' screams go quiet. Maybe you feel guilty, or maybe you don't, but either way there will be no Mission Failed sign for you. But later on down the line, there will be some consequences that you'll inevitably have to deal with, or perhaps some people won't look at you the same anymore.

This is the case for most of the many, many missions in Deus Ex: HR, where sometimes ignoring someone will have consequences eventually. And this hostage situation was just the tutorial.

But anyway: Welcome to Detroit!

You'll be playing as Adam Jensen (a sort of near-future Clint Eastwood), the chief of security for a multi-billion dollar corporation that specializes in artificial limbs and implants. (Collectively called "augments".) In the opening moments of the game, the corporation, Sarif Industries, is attacked by heavily-augmented terrorists, leaving most of the science staff, along with Jensen's girlfriend, dead by way of unsubtle means. While attempting to save the staff, Jensen is mangled and left for dead, but his employer sees fit to save his life by turning him into something of a cross between The Six Million Dollar Man and Robocop - except with kickass sunglasses.

Jensen gets back to work - like a boss - with his heavily-augmented body and continues to solve Sarif Industries' problems. Along the way, murmurs of a corporate conspiracy start arising, so Jensen must begin to balance his own personal interests (player's choice) and the demands of his boss if he ever wants to figure out the exact circumstances of his girlfriend's death. And it will be one crazy ride to get there.

It's very hard for me to give you an exact impression of what you'll be facing in Deus Ex: Human Revolution because of just how much you won't see on your first playthrough. I was going all out, exploring everything that I could, every corner of Detroit and Shanghai. It surprised me to no end when I found out, by way of the achievements that didn't ding for me, how much of the game I had missed! To that end, DE:HR is probably more comparable to Obsidian Entertainment's past ventures: Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol, on account of the very dynamic storyline. Entire sections of the game will be lost to you depending on your choices. This is a game that all but demands multiple playthroughs.

Not to mention that the story itself is very well-written. There are twists and turns, with all of the quests being very derivative of its hard science fiction theme. It makes it a very immersive experience when your missions involve collecting a debt from someone who got themselves some black market augments, or breaking up an illegal neuropozine smuggling ring. There are also a lot of very good points of debate that are brought up. Would human augmentation be a perversion of our very humanity? Or a harmless way for us to rise above our natural hindrances? I dunno.

Now on to the gameplay. As I said before, there are multiple ways you can approach this game. You can be all combat, all stealth, or someplace snugly in between. You could even go all melee if you wanted to, and bring down everyone with lethal or non-lethal takedowns. As a game that allows you the option to play how you like, it's pretty good at everything. No, the stealth sections aren't as good as those from the Splinter Cell series, you won't be shooting out lights or keeping to the shadows, and the FPS combat isn't as refined as Battlefield: Bad Company 2. But its still fun. Fallout 3 and New Vegas didn't have to be those games either to be absolutely immersive and entertaining.

But the RPG elements, the augmentation and conversation systems, are absolutely refined. The augments allow you to play your way, and play them awesomely. If you like sneaking around enemies, place points (called "praxis kits" in the game) into making your footsteps silent or refining your hacking abilities, which allows you to open locked doors, shut down surveillance cameras, and even turn robots and turrets against your enemies. If you're more of a warmonger, you can increase your dermal armor, install the "Icarus Landing System" so that even jumping off a ledge will get someone killed, or make your augmented weapon, the "Typhoon", even more devastating.

And BioWare take note, DE:HR employs the use of a conversation system that I found wholly superior to those of the Mass Effect series and Dragon Age 2. Though there weren't as many options as I would've liked, nor did they pop up as frequently as I would've liked, knowing the intent of what you were going to have Jensen say, as well as knowing almost exactly what was going to be said, was very welcomed. This means that attempting to sigh doesn't turn into a death threat, as in Exhibit A.

This is a great game all around. The story, gameplay, visuals, characters, locations, RPG elements: all stellar. It's not a perfect game, though. There are a few things that keep it from absolute greatness in my mind.

The first are some technical hiccups. Let's keep in mind that DE:HR is the premier title for Eidos Montreal. The pressure could not have been any higher, as both a sequel to a beloved franchise and their first game ever. But I'm sure there were limitations, as the animations and lip-synching aren't really up to snuff for the most part. You'll see most of the women performing the same body movements, and when people speak, their lips are only just keeping up with what they're supposed to be saying. It's pretty noticeable at first, but eventually, depending on your interest in the story, you'll probably end up forgetting all about it.

The second, bigger, flaw that I personally took umbrage at was the boss fights. Yes, in a game that emphasizes player agency and freedom of choice, you are downright forced to fight your way through a series of bosses. You can't talk your way out of them or circumvent them in any way. Regardless of your spec - stealth, hacking, etc. - it's gonna be combat time. People with points in shielding and the typhoon weapon will have no problem, while everyone else will likely struggle a bit. In any case, they're an unwelcome element, especially since they're the least characterized NPCs in the game, which only adds insult to injury. The cliche monster is almost nowhere to be found in the rest of the game, but rears its ugly head here with a vengeance.

That being said, Deus Ex: Human Revolution still manages to rise above its flaws. I would personally call it a masterpiece of the genre: an RPG that actually gives meaning to the words (acronym?), though it's not as big of a sandbox as Fallout 3 or New Vegas, and it's not as pretty as Mass Effect, it sits in the vacuum left over by both series and should satisfy fans of both. Unlike Mass Effect, your choices really do matter, and unlike Fallout the story is much more prevalent. It's pretty much a happy medium between the two.

I hope it doesn't take another four years of development for Eidos Montreal to get a sequel out the door, but this game has more than enough content to keep us playing for some time. Not to mention that their next project, already in development, is Thief 4. Weeeee!

Game Review: Dead Space 2

Typical outcome: "It's beautifu-OH SHI-!"

It's like being asked if you want to be bit by a rattlesnake a second time: Hey, wanna go up against the necromorphs again? Huh? Do ya? Rawr?

But by the time my copy of Dead Space 2 came in the mail, I was psyched beyond any semblance of a care. I thankfully knew very little about the story, or even what to expect. I knew my mom probably wouldn't like the game very much, but, then again, she's the one who introduced me to The Thing. I was very excited going into this game, with expectations that sat pretty high up there. It would've been very easy for Visceral Games to just rehash the first game (like BioWare, they're a subsidiary of EA), but I was amazed that DS2 pretty much met all of them, and did so with style.

The game's story picks up some three years after the quagmire on the Ishimura, with Isaac Clarke waking up in the psych ward of a hospital, confused and suffering from a severe bout of trauma-induced amnesia. He remembers absolutely nothing since escaping from the Aegis System, but he does remember just enough for him to recognize a necromorph infestation when he sees it. Things just never get better for good ol' Issac.

Barely escaping with his life, Isaac is thrown into absolute chaos, with no other real objective except to survive. As he soon discovers, the place he's currently running around is "The Sprawl": a massive, self-contained city built around a shard of Titan, one of Saturn's presently-pulverized moons. Things are gradually going from bad to superbad, as the necromorph infestation spreads violently throughout the unsuspecting populace. He (and by extension, you) has no idea how the necromorphs appeared here or how to even go about stopping it. Eventually, he comes into contact with several other characters, who shed some light on a conspiracy at the heart of it all, and inform Isaac Clarke of just how f**ked he is.

Without giving too much away, I absolutely loved how the story unfolded in Dead Space 2. Much like its predecessor, it's a slow process of gathering information and just taking a look around, but unlike DS1, this game doesn't even tell you where you are, or why you've woken up in a straight-jacket! It's reminiscent of the mansion from Resident Evil; you're just there, bad things are happening, and it takes some time to figure out what due to the horrible, horrible circumstances. There's a palpable sense of wandering in ignorance at the worst possible place, at the worst possible time - minus the Jill sandwich.

As for the location you wander in ignorance, the Sprawl is pretty much the opposite of the USG Ishimura, in that there are less winding corridors, more open locations (comparable to the Ishimura's bridge area), and many more pretty things to look at. Dead Space was a visually stunning game to me, especially considering that it's just about three years old. Even on the Xbox 360 version, Dead Space 2 looks even better. Everything looks cleaner, the use of light to create mood and tension has been employed more frequently, and the level-design is fantastic.

As before, there are no real loading screens or "cutscenes" in Dead Space 2, only strategically-placed elevators or story moments to distract you from when the game's actually doing its work. The camera never cuts away for the entire game (unless you die), so when shit goes down, it's very unexpected. This also makes the Sprawl feel as massive as it looks, since the entire city was actually designed around the areas you can explore (much like Alan Wake and Mirror's Edge). It feels like a real spacestation, and that's the important part. There are apartment complexes, shopping malls, food courts, a church, sewers, and other spoiler-ific places that you'll be fighting your way through. Some care clearly went into the design of this game if they designed a whole city even though you only play through certain parts.

Click to see just how massive the Sprawl appears.

Overkill? Perhaps, but it makes the experience. (It's an eight hour game spread across two discs, which should give you an idea of how dense this game is!)

So, it's bigger, prettier, and the story expands upon the main plot and the lore in all the right places. But is it fun to play? Well, Visceral Games have clearly charged ahead here with that old mantra in mind: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are many gameplay tweaks that rectify the major hangups that most people had with the first game. The zero gravity sections now allow you to float around them using thrusters, instead of a point-and-click bounce from one room to the other. Isaac is also a little more maneuverable, where he was previously kinda sluggish, which makes a big difference during an attack.

The return of "context-sensitive events" that pop up every now and then was very welcomed. Nothing breaks up expectations like being suddenly flung through space, forced to maneuver your way through debris along the way. They're almost like unique mini-games that you only play once, much like the drag tentacles from DS1. More of that is always nice.

But aside from tweaks and the token addition of weapons and new brands of necromorphs (terrifying, though they are), the gameplay remains largely unchanged from the last game. For better or worse, you're still dismembering necromorphs for eight hours, which gets noticeably repetitive this time through. This wasn't much of a problem in the last game, since getting acquainted with "dismemberment combat" and the necromorphs themselves was half the fun. Not to mention the encounters were more infrequent and set up with a greater sense of subtlety, which just built more tension. This time, you just get swarmed. Every time you feel like you're gonna get swarmed or attacked, you do. Lots of swarming going on.

It would be the equivalent of picking up Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age 2 for the first time and discovering that geth/darkspawn are the prime enemy again, and you're gonna be fighting them exclusively for the whole game again. When it comes to the combat, there's a lot of deja vu going on, and I'm worried that Visceral Games are beginning to back themselves into a corner in that regard. I didn't care for Gears of War 2 because you were just fighting more of the Locust Horde, and I don't much care for Halo because in this rich sci-fi universe Bungie created, the Covenant and their various sects are apparently the only threat to a supersoldier in the entire galaxy.

Variety is the spice of life, Visceral, and making a variety of one type of enemy isn't gonna cut it for Dead Space 3, because it almost didn't work with Dead Space 2. The necromorphs are scary as hell, but so were the zombies in Resident Evil, and you can see what repetition did to those guys. Dead Space 3 needs to be your Resident Evil 4, where you go back to the drawing board and make with the "outside the box" stuff.

So, I guess my main gripe with the game isn't necessarily with the game itself, but with the direction of the franchise overall. You can just see Dead Space there, with its sci-fi universe that I'd seriously rank up there creativity-wise with BioWare's Mass Effect series, teetering on the edge of becoming a series about shooting different kinds of necromorphs in slightly different ways. Once you get swarmed for the billionth time, the scares and the immersion goes away. The opening? That was terrifying. The school? Nightmare-inducing. Getting swarmed again outside the factory? Annoying.

But it says a lot about the general atmosphere, art direction, and story of this game that I'm willing to shoot my way through even more swarms just to play through it again (having New Game+ available doesn't hurt either). It may not do anything particularly daring gameplay-wise, but everything else tries to do what Dead Space did great, and do them even better. In my mind, they succeeded, and they've definitely made a fan out of me. Dead Space 2 is still an amazing, terrifying, and immersive experience worthy of the hard sci-fi genre that it celebrates. If you loved the first game, there should be very little dissuading you from trying out its sequel.

It's a beautiful game, and your mom will hate it.

The UK: What I've Learned (Part One: Response)

A response to Mister Buch's post: "America: What I Have Learned"

I think it can be a bit of a curse living in America. Not sure where I heard it, but some think it kinda silly that when Americans go on vacation, we visit our own country. Meanwhile, my friend in Germany heads off to France or the Czech Republic every time he and his wife need time away. And Mister Buch has been known to visit Wales from time to time. I've never been to another country before, though America's options are decidedly limited. We've got Canada to our north and Mexico to the south. We've also got Cuba, but We Don't Go To Cuba.

In that sense, I guess I can see why people here can get a little ethnocentric. The majority of us are simply not altogether bothered with the attractions of other lands. We are the best, because we are the United States. We are the United States, because we are the best. Maybe it's because patriotism is a surefire way to hold a country this size together without running the risk of secession; I'm looking at you Texas.

The long and short of this is: we often forget the rest of the world exists. Heck, I'm almost positive that most people in America aren't even aware that we have territory down around Australia! (And I'm not claiming to be one of them.)

To that end, learning about the United Kingdom has been a blast. As is the typical villain speech: "We're not so different, you and I." But I thought I'd start off by responding to Buch's points.

1) They really don't have biscuits. They have chocolate chip cookies and they have Twix bars, and that is all. They have the word 'biscuits' which they use to describe a sort of scone-like thing that you apparently have with a pale, grey sauce.

I think we both found this hilariously frustrating, because it's not like these words don't exist in our rhetoric, we've just gone around and completely switched the meanings for them entirely. Their "biscuits" are our "cookies." Our "biscuits" are much like their scones, but we have a tendency to eat ours with country gravy and chicken-fried steak if we're feeling especially crazy. I've also found that this makes for an uneasy culinary topic!

2) To them, Kentucky Fried Chicken is a shameful place to eat and also, wierdly, the basis of racial stereotyping (I don't know why), rather than the 'kind of fancier alternative to McDonalds' it is here.

I don't have very many nice things to say about KFC personally. In addition to McDonalds, they're kind of seen as the epicenter of the "obesity epidemic" that we're currently experiencing. Though, I chalk that up to America's deplorable standards of meat quality and safety compared to other countries. In any case, just not a big fan of the Colonel.

3) They do not know what the word 'beefburger' means, not even when you explain it by comparing it to 'cheeseburger'.

Honestly, I've never heard the word "beefburger" used in any restaurant of any kind, fancy or casual. Actually, I don't think I've ever personally used the word verbally but once or twice in my entire life, which is probably the record among everyone I've ever known. No, we don't use the word "beefburger," we proudly use the words "cheeseburger" or "hamburger" to describe a nationally favored product that is never made using pork products. Proudly.

4) Alaska and Hawaii are nowhere near where I thought they were, and absolutely not where they appear on that bullshit map of theirs, which probably exists just to confuse us.

We forget they exist sometimes, too. Hawaii is out in the middle of the Pacific, and Alaska hangs out with Russia and Canada a little bit too much for our liking.

5) Instead of letter-boxes in their doors or the little boxes on sticks with surnames on, like you see in the films, they actually have large filing cabinets in the middle of the street.

Most of the homes out in the country have the little mailboxes on posts, or older parts of a city. It's easy for pedestrians to just reach in and swipe stuff out of those kinds of boxes (it happened to us once or twice when we had one), so the vast majority of people use the gray USPS filing cabinets. Not very romantic, but we're paranoid like that.

6) Whatever their relative average intelligence, Americans are absolutely not uninformed. Sorry British people, but just because we speak more elegantly doesn't make us cleverer. Laziness is curiously not encouraged in the United States: the fierce, inhuman, competitive spirit that powers Samuel L Jackson and Ryan Seacrest on a daily basis lives within all of them, instilled at an early age. In terms of competition and personal pride, they're like Germans but without the organisational skills.

Very flattering! I'm in a position to be able to see the best and the worst that America has to offer, so I can agree with some of this and find a little room to argue, as well. We're not a country that strives toward intellectual betterment as much anymore, judging by the consistent defunding of our educational institutions. Religion is a very prevalent thing here, and is typically one of the main, debated factors in getting a president elected or a piece of legislation passed.

This, in combination with our occasional bouts of ethnocentrism, mostly ensures that some people are very uninformed about most things. You know that nice, socialized health care that most other civilized countries (and Canada) enjoy? Yeah, we voted against that for some reason. So, there's that.

But there's a word that I think does define us: competitive. We absolutely love to compete against other countries and among ourselves. Sometimes our talks about landing on the moon are still underscored with lingering gratification over having beaten the Russians up there. And the tl;dr for our contributions to the war effort in World War 2 would probably/definitely read, "You're welcome, World."

And while we're not necessarily lazy, we do have a knack for bringing cool things to us instead of going out and visiting them. Case-in-point: you can see the Eiffel Tower, an Egyptian pyramid, and the Statue of Liberty in Las Vegas.

7) They have a fast-food chain called 'In-N-Out Burger', and nobody over there finds that funny. This is by far my favourite US fact.

We do have this, and it's amazing. Also, we like to rub this in the faces of anyone east of the Sierras and west of the Pacific coastline.

8) One more food one: Taco trucks. These are literal trucks where meat is prepared and eaten.

Now, this is something typical to California and most places along the Mexican border. I can't speak for most places up north, though I don't recall seeing any food trucks of any kind in Colorado. These taco trucks qualify for a street vendor permit (which is much, much cheaper than a restaurant permit), and it's easier for them to just drive these things around instead of pushing them back and forth to their houses, so they just put two and two together and made something awesome.

The best food is usually served out of a bus.

9) Americans do not know what the UK's flag is called, despite the fact that we were good enough to emerse ourselves in their culture like Malcolm McDowell with his eyes being held open in A Clockwork Orange, to the point that we have now quietly adopted their language, because it just seems easier not to try remembering how things used to be spelled... in the before-time...

No, we have no idea what the UK flag is called. But to be fair, as far as most Americans are concerned, the United Kingdom, Britain, and England are all the same place. We do love Malcolm McDowell, though!

10) They really do prefer their version of The Office. They're not just teasing us.

If you tell most Americans that there's a British version of the show, they'll probably think it's a spin-off of our version! It takes some serious dedication on our part to seek out the original over here. So far, I've only seen it aired on Cartoon Network, so that should give you some idea, lol.

11) 'Fox News' is apparently not a comedy.

It should come as a shock to most people outside of the United States that a very large number of people take this channel very, very seriously. It's where religious and fiscal conservatism finds its voice, and they are very loud.

12) Who loves orange soda? Kel loves orange soda.

He really, really does, and we wouldn't have it any other way! He also dropped the screw in the tuna.

(Tardy) Game Review: Dead Space

My first experience with the survival/horror genre was Resident Evil 2 on the original Playstation. My family had gone out to a friend's ranch in the middle of nowhere. It was full dark, we were surrounded by orchards, old machinery, and there were coyotes yapping in the distance. Probably my first, intense feeling of isolation, and it was at that magical moment that our friend's son asked me, "Hey, do you want to play some Playstation?" I could not refuse. This was back when the Playstation was this magical, disc-using wonder of a game system. I loved just watching the thing work.

So, he puts in Resident Evil 2. By the time we get past the first cutscene, I'm already going pale. I had no concept of zombies at that time either, so this was all a great shock to me. Then the game starts going, and Leon Kennedy is desperately pumping round after round into things that die... and then they don't? I never even got to play (the guy was one of those gamers: "Hey, lemme show you something real quick."), but even so, I was terrified. Don't even get me started on how badly those zombies breaking into that gun store scarred me (hint, hint: probably scarred for life). Nowhere was safe!

Then someone suggested Silent Hill and I remember very little after that.

Anyway, my gaming origins, so to speak, are rooted in survival/horror. Since that night, instead of flinching away from any other games of that type from Capcom and others, I ran toward them. I don't know why I did that. Maybe after a scare that bad, it's like a "hair of the dog" kind of thing. As the years went on, I'm not sure if the games stopped being scary, or if nothing had reached that RE2 level of scary since. Resident Evil 4 was the last real freaky-ass game I've played. There's been Bioshock and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but neither of those scared me in the least. I don't even remember jumping.

That's where Dead Space comes in. I had bought it during a Steam sale without really thinking too hard about it. (The game was $5 at the time.) I played the first level, and while it hooked me, I was still getting acquainted with playing games on the PC. This was back when I had just picked up my new comp components, and could suddenly play games of a higher graphical quality than Minesweeper.

The other day, I picked it up again (with the intention of finishing a game so I could clear it off my hard drive), and was suddenly really taken by it. The atmosphere, the story, the gameplay, the macabre and grotesque antagonists: it all sorta clicked. I couldn't put the game down, and ended up finishing it that night. Let me tell you, playing at night was a bad idea.

For the yet-to-be-initiated, Dead Space is a survival/horror game that takes place in spaaaaace. A massive, sub-orbital mining vessel (also known as a "planet cracker") called the U.S.G. Ishimura has recently gone dark, and a distress signal is sent out. The corporation that owns the ship tasks Isaac Clarke, a space-engineer (Space Mario), and his team with figuring out what's gone wrong on the Ishimura, and to fix the problem if possible. After a hard landing, the rescue team finds that the ship appears abandoned. This doesn't last too long, though, as they're soon attacked by the gruesome, mutated creatures informally named "necromorphs."

The whole of Ishimura's crew have been mutated into decidedly inhuman beings, and they don't have a fondness for anything that isn't dead. So, Issac and the rescue team have to figure out a way to get off the planet cracker, stop the necromorphs from infecting other planets (mainly Earth), all the while attempting to look for survivors. Issac's girlfriend, Nicole, was also a member of the crew, so he also has to deal with that along the way - on top of everything else.

All right: the necromorphs. It's clear that this game was primarily inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing, and this is a very good thing (hehe). The monsters you fight are not only painfully scary, they're downright disturbing. You might spend moments of your fights with them just reconciling what they were with what they are. Much like Gabriel Iglesias' "Six Levels of Fatness," there are Six Levels of Scary in this game:

1. Creepy

2. Freaky

3. Frightening

4. Disturbing

5. DAMN!

6. F**ked Up

Sometimes I'd die because I was so distracted by the design of these things, looking on in horror as they approached. Dealing with that is just one part of the game, though. Let's not forget that you're in outer space, and the developers have gone all out to ensure that they take advantage of this. You'll be playing engineer a lot (maybe more than some would like), and fighting things like rogue asteroids, orbit decay, and zero gravity in order to get yourself the hell outta Dodge.

And this is what I really liked about Dead Space. All of your missions, for better or worse, are always sci-fi oriented. Go restore gravity to this deck, take a walk outside before a meteor shower tears you to shreds, play some zero-g basketball to retrieve a nav card (yes, this is an option), learn about the future's most prevalent religion: Unitology. All of this makes your stay aboard the Ishimura a very immersive one. You get a really good feel of how the crew operated aboard the vessel, humanity's economy, technology, social structure. It's a nice, clean(ish) cross-section of a very well thought-out science fictional future in store for humankind.

This isn't a straight-up gorefest. Clearly a lot of thought was put into making the ship and the society that clings to the stars around it feel very logical. That's the key to good science fiction and good horror. Things just flat out make sense. You'll spend very little time questioning the science of this or the logic of that.

If there is one thing that this game suffers from, it's the "Oh! Just one more thing!" syndrome that some games suffer from. This can make the game feel very frustrating at times. Yes, you've just spent an hour fixing the shuttle: Oh! Just one more thing! It seems someone removed the navigational system from it, so I guess you'll have to find it. Yes, you've just spent an hour getting the Ishimura's engine's back online: Oh! Just one more thing! It seems we're passing through an asteroid field now, so you'd better get the defensive countermeasures up and running before we do anything else.

It feels very much like Alan Wake or Dragon Age 2 when they're at their worst (which, for DA2, is all the time - hiyooo!). It can never just be over and done with. One more thing has to go wrong so you'll spend more time running around the ship from hell. Dead Space is fantastic, but the Writer of Subtle Plotlines over at Visceral Games seems to take a vacation at random times. Still, even then, some of these little sidequests take you to some amazing places. So while I don't applaud how they get you there, I'm glad that they get you there, if that makes any sense. It's like being driven to an arcade in a Ford Pinto.

And I just have to say that the visuals are dazzling. For a three-year-old game, there were several moments where I just had to stand and stare for a while. Remember that one really great moment in Mass Effect 2, when you step into the exposed CIC of the Normandy as it's getting torn apart by the Collector vessel? There are several just like that.

Sometimes it's a blessing: playing a game so late in its life cycle. Because now I've played a game that I truly love, and I don't have to wait any time at all to play the sequel! Dead Space is just a fantastic game. No, it's not perfect, but it's original where it counts. Much like Mirror's Edge, you just don't expect games like this to come around every dynasty. Dead Space is a violent, shocking, disturbing, thought-provoking game that's damn fun to play. The immersion factor is high, the sci-fi is mostly on par with Mass Effect, and it'll probably scare the hell out of you.

If you haven't played it, give it a try! Again, like Mirror's Edge, you could probably pick it up for $10 easy. You could do worse!

America: What I Have Learned

At the moment I'm not so proud of my own country, which has gotten me comparing it to the next one along - no, not France. I mean the more successful, handsome, rich kid who lives a few streets away, who the United Kingdom likes to hang out with so it can watch him play his Super Nintendo and perv off its much prettier mum: the United States of America.

Over the last few years, my life has become distinctly more internet-based, and as such, less English. I've been basically a hermit: I'm not even joking. More and more, I stay in and spend my time online - reading Roger Ebert rather than watching Jonathon Ross, catching up with Cheers on YouTube instead of following whatever the hell passes for British comedy at the moment, and carrying-out a lot of my social life on forums and Google-chat.

Mostly this has involved long talks with my co-author on this site - a slightly younger man from California whose company is always a pleasure, even if it does necessitate neither of us ever leaving our homes. One thing that comes up endlessly in these chats, endlessly, is cultural differences. I think it's fair to say that the general British and Irish understanding of what Americans are like is halfway between Peter Griffin and Samuel L Jackson, because these are the two representatives who we are mostly exposed to. We see US citizens, on the whole, as loud, stupider than us, fatter than us, aggressively Christian, pigheaded, extremely dangerous, and yet in all cases inexplicably adorable, like a puppy dog with a lit firework in its mouth. Although my main source defies all of these characteristics, I still think it's about right.

History's most terrifying single image, or kind of cute? YOU DECIDE.

And Americans see us, I think, as 'The United what?' or 'Susan Boyle', both of which are pretty accurate descriptions.

So for three years or more, I've picked-up a lot of little bits of information which completely surpised me. I'm going to share a few of them now - and remember, all of these are 100% accurate.

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1) They really don't have biscuits. They have chocolate chip cookies and they have Twix bars, and that is all. They have the word 'biscuits' which they use to describe a sort of scone-like thing that you apparently have with a pale, grey sauce.

2) To them, Kentucky Fried Chicken is a shameful place to eat and also, wierdly, the basis of racial stereotyping (I don't know why), rather than the 'kind of fancier alternative to McDonalds' it is here.

3) They do not know what the word 'beefburger' means, not even when you explain it by comparing it to 'cheeseburger'.

4) Alaska and Hawaii are nowhere near where I thought they were, and absolutely not where they appear on that bullshit map of theirs, which probably exists just to confuse us.

5) Instead of letter-boxes in their doors or the little boxes on sticks with surnames on, like you see in the films, they actually have large filing cabinets in the middle of the street.

6) Whatever their relative average intelligence, Americans are absolutely not uninformed. Sorry British people, but just because we speak more elegantly doesn't make us cleverer. Laziness is curiously not encouraged in the United States: the fierce, inhuman, competitive spirit that powers Samuel L Jackson and Ryan Seacrest on a daily basis lives within all of them, instilled at an early age. In terms of competition and personal pride, they're like Germans but without the organisational skills. If you think I'm making this up, Britain - have you ever been part of a 'spelling bee', which I understand is a spelling contest for children that takes place outside school hours, when X-Men is on, and is often voluntary? No.

7) They have a fast-food chain called 'In-N-Out Burger', and nobody over there finds that funny. This is by far my favourite US fact.

8) One more food one: Taco trucks. These are literal trucks where meat is prepared and eaten.

9) Americans do not know what the UK's flag is called, despite the fact that we were good enough to emerse ourselves in their culture like Malcolm McDowell with his eyes being held open in A Clockwork Orange, to the point that we have now quietly adopted their language, because it just seems easier not to try remembering how things used to be spelled... in the before-time...

Hoe-nor?

10) They really do prefer their version of The Office. They're not just teasing us.

11) 'Fox News' is apparently not a comedy.

12) Who loves orange soda? Kel loves orange soda.

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And with that, I'm really out of ideas. Believe it or not, after all that (when I try to be funny it always ends-up smarmy and hateful,) I'm very fond of the place. If we seem to obsess over the country and follow them around at parties, there are good reasons, beyond the obvious wanting-to-be-on-their-side-in-the-next-World-War.

Every time I look at a website, and every time Knight and I chat, I pick up another little fact I never realised, something awful they never dared show us or the occasional quiet triumph that never made it to the news here.

Meanwhile, we're sat around reading about how our children spent the day burning down Selfridge's in town. At least it beats watching bloody Outnumbered.

Japanese: Day ???, Wait let me check... Carry the three... 187-ish?

Can't believe it's been so long since I've posted an update on my progress! Truth be told, there hasn't been much, but it seems like there has. I've pretty much gotten the Hiragana syllabary down to where I can recognize a kana character, romanize it, and say it out loud pretty accurately. I still slip up on a few of them, specifically ま(ma),ほ (ho), and は (ha), since the three look pretty similar.

But besides that part of the process (which kinda took longer than I thought it would), I've been slow to start on Katakana because I keep worrying that I'll mix the two "alphabets" up. As a brief recap, Hiragana is the "alphabet" used to write out Japanese things and phrases in Japanese. I say "Japanese things" because you cannot write out foreign words like America, England, or Canada in Japanese without using the secondary alphabet, Katakana. So, America becomes Amerika becomes アメリカ, England becomes Igirisu becomes イギリス, Canada becomes Kanada becomes カナダ.

As a comparison: アメリカ (America) written in Hiragana instead of Katakana looks like this: あめりか. It's basically their way of adopting foreign words into their written language, much in the same way we romanize and italicize theirs.

Now, Kanji, on the other hand, has been both interesting and daunting. If you want to write out a noun or an adjective, you just do it. Book, ball, red, king, shellfish, serenity. Kanji takes words like that and translates them into (sometimes) single, complex characters that it seems like you'd need to be an artist to reproduce. "Book" becomes 本 which also means other things, too, apparently. "King" becomes 王. It's kinda crazy!

So, that's pretty much where I'm at. I'm also messing around with grammar, which has been fun. I picked up an Android app called Human Japanese that's been working wonders for me. If you have an interest in the language and want to start with something closer to Rosetta Stone rather than a textbook, that's definitely the way to go. Can't recommend it enough so far.

Mata ne!