Knight's October-November Schedule

I couldn't be more excited for the end of October to roll around. It kinda reminds me of last October, when Fallout: New Vegas and Fable 3 were both released a week from each other. A shame that Fable 3 didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, but New Vegas more than picked up the slack.

SO! We've got a bunch of games coming out. I've been steadily saving up for them for most of the year, but that doesn't mean they won't cause some financial troubles down the line. I've been a lot more careful about buying games recently, but it doesn't help that the games coming up are sequels to those few that I pretty much vowed upon Cavalry that I'd purchase.

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October 25 - Battlefield 3

Ever since Battlefield 1942, these games have been a guilty pleasure of mine. It also helps that Bad Company 2 is one of the few competitive online multiplayer games that I'm actually decent at. All of the trailers for it look fantastic and it seems like they've put some work into making the campaign good for those of us who won't be skipping it altogether. I'm very excited for this, and it sounds like EA's going all out to try and lock down some of Activision's player base for themselves, so that can only mean good things... initially.

November 8 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

I've been flip-flopping on this, so I might end up waiting on it and save myself a little money. But I love the Call of Duty series. The campaigns are usually pretty exciting, the multiplayer is addicting, and it helps that it's pretty much the one game that I can expect most of my friends to pick up. But this is only a couple weeks after Battlefield 3, and I'm not really planning on being bored with that game after only fourteen days. I've had Bad Company 2 for a year and I still play it.

But MW3, I'm still itching to see how the campaign will progress. For all its nonsense, MW2 had a pretty damn magnificent campaign, perfectly-paced and cinematic, and if MW3 can even so much as match its predecessor, then I'll be happy.

November 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

This is the one game I would forsake all others to play. Oblivion was pretty much a launch title for the Xbox 360, and I've found a reason to keep playing it ever since. The visuals look amazing, Skyrim itself looks fantastic and alive, and I've invested enough into the storyline that I'm interested to see how things have changed in Tamriel after the Septim bloodline was severed and Cyrodiil fell into decline. There's just so much I want to see, and I just... there's all that...

I WANT TO SLAY A DRAGON!

November 15 - Assassin's Creed: Revelations

I remember playing the first Assassin's Creed for the first time and not thinking very highly of it. I tend to think it was just the circumstances, but even so. Assassin's Creed II, though, had my full attention. It was fun and awe-inspiring romp through Renaissance-era Italy, not to mention an historically-accurate one. I thought Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood would be the series cash-in, but boy was I wrong on that one; it turned out even better than its predecessor by a wide margin.

AC: Revelations will be the third game in the series in three years, and it doesn't look like the quality has dropped at all. We'll see Ezio Auditore da Firenze traveling through Constantinople for what appears to be his last ride. There are few video game characters that I'd say are worthy of having three games all to themselves, but Ezio was definitely one of them. I'm glad they gave his story the focus it deserves. Heck, they've pretty much followed his life from birth and, with Brotherhood, continued to do so well into his 50s. Not many games can boast that.

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On November 16th, I'll be taking out a loan. >.<

DLC Review/Retrospective - Fallout: New Vegas - "Lonesome Road"

"If they matter... if history matters... we'll see at the end of the road."

The opening moments of Fallout: New Vegas see you shot in the head and left buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the Mojave. Somehow still clinging to life, you're rescued and brought to the town of Goodsprings, where Doc Mitchell cares for you until you've made a full recovery. This is not the beginning of your story, the Courier's story, nor is it the end - but it was meant to be.

Enter Ulysses: the original Courier Six. The man who was supposed to deliver the Platinum Chip in the first place, but backed out of the job when he saw that you were next in line. Aware of what he'd be carrying, and knowing full well that the job was very likely a suicide mission, he stepped aside in the hopes that you would be killed before you even made delivery. Obviously, this didn't happen, much to Ulysses' disappointment.

But who is this other courier? Why does he want you dead?

Throughout Fallout: NV and it's subsequent add-ons, this story arc quietly builds in the background. A throw-away comment here, an oddly-named item there, until eventually it comes to a head. And it all begins with you sitting in a cave somewhere in the Big Empty, hearing Ulysses' voice on a holotape, the contempt he has for you and everything you've supposedly done. And in the closing seconds, he makes a solemn promise:

"At the Divide, he and I... there, we'll have an ending to things."

And he would be right.

Lonesome Road has you tracking down Ulysses through the Divide: a massive fissure that's formed in the middle of a once-thriving city of the Old World. Here, the wind is strong enough to tear the skin from your body, irradiated soldiers from both sides of a dead conflict wander in a haze of insanity, and mutated creatures lie in wait just below the surface. It's very unlikely that you'll find your happy place here. This is a depressing, emotional, and heart-breaking road you must travel, but I couldn't think of a better way for this game to come to an end.

This is your story. Your road. You're here because you want to be, and you can leave at anytime. But if you keep walking... you're gonna see some things.

The Divide ain't what it used to be.

The first thing you're going to notice about the Divide is, well, that it's pretty damn big. You begin on a cliff overlooking the whole of it, and it's just an amazing sight to see. I just sat there staring for a bit, and eventually said to myself, "Shit, I gotta walk through that." The Divide ain't pretty like Zion; it's a very intimidating piece of real estate. This is made even more interesting by how it was designed. Unlike the other three DLC hubs - The Sierra Madre, Zion, and The Big Empty - The Divide is actually one long road, winding through ruined cities, collapsed tunnels, across highways, and down into the giant fissure. You're still free to come and go and explore as you please (and there are still a ton of places to poke around), but since you're always moving forward through the landscape, you're never quite sure where you're going to end up next.

In this sense, Lonesome Road definitely has the most variety out of all the add-ons. Each of the locations in the Divide are unique from each other in some way. They're very competently-designed, and clearly show that Obsidian intended to go out with a bang, throwing as many eggs into that proverbial basket as they could. Buildings collapse into the fissure, earthquakes will knock things off of shelves, and debris constantly blocks your way. But wait! You can remove that debris by seeking out discarded warheads and setting them off with your trusty detonator. Time the explosions right, and you can take out some advancing enemies, too.

There are new armor sets, new items, new achievements, and new weapons, such as the "Red Pulse," which is pretty much an automatic rocket launcher. (It's as awesome as it sounds.) The only real downside is that since the Divide is an undesirable place to be, there isn't a surplus of NPCs to talk to. In fact, besides Ulysses, you'll only have your companion to talk to, but I'm not sure if I should spoil who that companion is. Not a big deal, but it was fun to discover who you'd be traveling with (and also figure out said companion's backstory.)

So what can you expect from the ending? Well, I can say that it was definitely a satisfying one, and will have vastly different outcomes depending on your decisions, a few of which were pretty tough for me to think through - and one of which can draw direct comparisons in terms of severity to the infamous Megaton decision from Fallout 3. So severe, in fact, that the Mojave Wasteland itself will be affected in some way: a first for FO DLCs.

And what of Ulysses? Again, I can't say much about him or his vendetta against the Courier. But rest assured, he has a very good reason to hate you, and it's not a reason that will sound completely out of the realm of possibility either. (Actually, I found myself thinking that I probably would've done the same thing in the Courier's shoes.) As Ulysses once said, "Couriers sometimes don't know the messages they bring."

Lonesome Road marks an end for the story of the Courier, a story that I've been following with much enthusiasm for the better part of a year. In that year, I've seen Obsidian create what I believe to be a masterpiece in the RPG genre: a game that not only aspired to have a great story, but great characters, locations, sidequests, world-building, and a level of immersion second to none. And then they decided to take things a step further, by creating a set of add-ons that could be collectively seen as a sequel in its own right.

Bethesda may have continued and updated the Fallout property, but Obsidian Entertainment refined it to the point of near-perfection, creating a product that trumps its predecessor in nearly every way. The franchise simply could not be in better hands, even if Bethesda decides to make the eventual sequel themselves. Obsidian know the lore, inside and out, they know what works, what doesn't, and how to tell stories within the universe that pack the hardest punch. I don't think I've played a game where a developer has had such a tight grip on such detailed lore and knew exactly how to wield it.

Fallout: New Vegas, along with all of its DLC - Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road - has been one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. It will most definitely go down as one of the best games I've ever played, up there with Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins.

Obsidian (and Chris Avellone, especially) should be proud of themselves, and it's my hope that they're allowed another crack at the property. My dream would involve Obsidian, Fallout, and the Skyrim engine, but only time will tell.

This is an end for the Courier, but I hope it's not the end. Either way, all roads lead home, and for now, the Courier's right where he needs to be.

Game Review(s): Dead Island (Link)

I think I've written three different reviews for this game, and none of them ended up here. What a shame. But it was mostly on account of the circumstances. The owner of Obnoxi.us gave me the opportunity to rant on his website, and my Amazon review of the game is the "most helpful" over on that end (for now; people tend to slam critical reviews back into the depths). So... blaaaah. Don't think this'll happen too often, but if you'd like to read what I thought of the game, here are the two places to do so!

"Obnoxi.us" Review

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Amazon Review

What I'd Like To See In DA Three. (The rest of this post will not rhyme.)

In which I make silly geek-demands that I have no business making.

It was like passing through the tail-end of Willy Wonka's Boatride of Terror: the day when I realized that I'm completely over Dragon Age 2. It was a great fucking day, brought about by BioWare's admission that, hey, the game wasn't all it could've been, that they'd be taking fan feedback seriously and trying to appeal to fans of DA:O a little better. (If you read between the lines, you could also kinda see them explain that some of the changes they made to the franchise were done because they absolutely had to. Possibly even forced to. Possibly. Doesn't matter anyway.)

They've promised a bigger, better, and richer experience with the inevitable sequel, using a proposed map for the next game, which is about 4 or 5x the size of Ferelden, to drive this point home (and they apparently also highlighted the map for DA2, which was about the size of Rhode Island compared to the other two maps).

Yes, talk is cheap, especially after BioWare went on the offensive after the release of DA2, but I don't know; the way they've talked openly about their mistakes, acknowledging the specific little things they could have done differently or better, that really got to me. It was like the BioWare I had supported had finally resurfaced after two years of Facebook games and shitty DLC. Maybe they have, maybe they haven't. We'll see. But the important thing is that I'm hesitantly pulling myself back onto the bandwagon. Kudos to Mike Laidlaw for accomplishing that with his openness and professionalism; it really goes a long way... David...

Anyway, with the load of ideas that have been thrown around by both BioWare and the community, I've thought up a small list of things I'd like to see in the sequel. Some are negotiable, and the inclusion/exclusion of some will probably keep me away for good. Don't mean to sound high or mighty or insinuate that I am in possession of a high horse, but knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have bought Dragon Age 2 on release, so I'll be on the lookout to ensure that doesn't happen again.

1. Multi-Purpose Dungeons (And Dungeons In General)

BioWare have already stated this wouldn't happen again (and also stated the dungeon snafu was one of the things that may, or may not have been, forced upon them), and they've already proven they're not as open to this strategy by releasing DA2: Legacy minus anything resembling that accursed place. But just because they're trending toward variety doesn't mean they shouldn't up the quality of the dungeons while they're at it.

The dungeons were on my list of things that needed to be improved from Dragon Age: Origins. The Deep Roads were arguably the most frequented locations in the whole game - hell, they pop up in both of the books, too - but they weren't very pleasing to the eye. In fact, they were downright bland at times. Lots of claustrophobic tunnels with very little variety beyond which direction they led you.

Why can't these dungeons look a little more stunning at times? Why can't they bleed the lore that's been put behind them? Wouldn't it be great to turn a corner in The Deep Roads and walk right into some long-abandoned capital city of the dwarves? I don't know. Maybe even less dungeons and more unique locations would be a better solution. Whatever they decide, I'd like better visuals, more detail, and fewer places that feel like an honest-to-goodness maze, like Kirkwall.

Also, less Kirkwall.

2. Kirkwall

Seriously, anything resembling Kirkwall will drive me right up the wall and into Bethesda's arms. Look at Kirkwall like Eidos Montreal looked at Deus Ex: Invisible War, as everything that should not go into a sequel.

3. Armor

This has been brought up a lot on the DA Forums, and it's been interesting how much this has made me think. BioWare want to stick with their decision to give companions "iconic" looks, which is what Dragon Age 2 did with mixed results. They essentially cut the player's ability to customize their companions with the armor that could be found along the way. It didn't work because: 1) It meant that unless you found an upgrade for your character, almost all of the armor you looted in the game was useless. 2) Your companions, with the exception of Aveline, wore the same outfits for ten years. 3)

...Wait. What were we talking about? Dragons or some shit?

Oh, yeah. It meant that you had to live with BioWare's shamelessness for the remainder of the game. It was something I wasn't very fond of in Mass Effect 2 and its implementation in Dragon Age 2 didn't make a believer out of me.

But even though BioWare are opting to keep this system, they're going to expand upon it, granting each companion several sets of "iconic" armor, along with reintroducing the time-honored system of customizing your companions' stats. This means that while you can't alter their appearance, you can still equip them with armor and mess with their stats. Giving a companion boots with +2 stamina won't change their boots visually, but they'll still have that +2 stamina.

I went over this in my mind, trying to figure out why BioWare was just soldiering forth with this system with such abandon. But honestly, this system makes sense to me. I'm going back in my mind, reliving the 3d BioWare games that I've played (KotOR, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect), and I can't really remember any armor sets that I particularly loved. I pretty much stuck with the Sith Master Robes in KotOR, the Spectre Armor in Mass Effect, and I wasn't really satisfied with any of the rogue armor in DA:O until I played through Awakening and found the Blackblade Armor.

The customization was always there, but the visuals for the various armor pieces were typically bland, or they were just copies of other armor sets with different colors added. There's a reason for this, though. (I think!) Let's focus on Dragon Age: Origins, and let's say you want to make a set of armor to be used in-game. First you have to design it, write the stats, and model it in-game, but then you have to re-model it to fit the body-types of elves, dwarves, and humans, because unless there are restrictions, all of the races can wear most of the armor. Then you have to remodel that set again to fit the body-types of female elves, dwarves, and humans. So, to make one set of armor in DA:O, you essentially have to make it six times over.

This probably explains why Sten just looked like a bigger human, so they wouldn't have to make each armor seven times.

Thinking of this, and then realizing, "Shit, they usually try and cram a lot of items into the game, too," and "How many other RPGs have customizable companions... or even companions, for that matter?" made me much more open to these "iconic" looks. It frees up the developers to focus on giving companions various looks that make sense within the context of the game, along with unique body-types, and also hopefully gives them more time to focus on the armor sets for the player character. Hopefully. All of this hinges on BioWare's commitment to this system. If it's one big cut corner like Dragon Age 2 was, then I see no redeeming factor there.

And I do hope this system is not applied to the player character. If I find some silly-looking boots that are clear upgrades, I want to have to live with that!

4. Set Character

I did not like Hawke in any way. I didn't like his prefab backstory, how he went on autopilot during the time jumps, and I didn't like his family or his rise to power. (Or that silly blood mark across his face that was never freaking explained!) I didn't like being forced to care about him either. Your sibling dies in the first five minutes: So fucking what? Mass Effect gave you more wiggle room in terms of character creation than DA2 ever did, and the Dragon Age series is the one out of the two that traces its roots back to D&D!

A set character worked for Mass Effect, it worked for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it worked with The Witcher 2, but it doesn't work (and hasn't worked) with the Dragon Age series. Dragon Age: Origins was unique, in that by the time you got past Orzammar, you could have a character that was almost completely incomparable to a character of another playthrough. The origins made the game an interesting, entertaining, and completely replayable experience. I would hope that DA3 brings this back in some way. Keeping the voiced protagonist, which seems to be the preference of the majority (unfortunately), kinda ensures that a Dragon Age game with multiple playable races isn't very likely.

Even so, multiple origins for a single race wouldn't be out of the question, would it? I don't know; having all that freedom to define my characters the way I wanted was what made DA:O one of my all time favorite games. Losing that freedom in DA2 was heartbreaking. I would love to see it return in some form.

5. Party Banter + Me

Someone brought this up in the forums, and David Gaider said that they're playing with the idea. If so, I would definitely like it. What it seemed like they said concerned the party banter, and being able to somehow contribute to it. That would be a great freaking idea. And heck, it doesn't even have to include the player character; how about if Fenris and Varric say that they're gonna play cards at The Hanged Man that night, you can actually catch them there and drop in on their game. The party banter in DA2 always made me feel like the NPCs were playing a better game than I was.

6. Character Design

After a lot of thought, I think they were on the right track with the redesigns made in DA2, but I still think they need a little tweaking. The elves, specifically. They just weren't very consistent; some bordered on cartoony, others looked like Greys, and at least one looked like he missed the bus to Final Fantasy XIII. The other races worked out pretty well, though.

7. Thedas

This is the big one for me.

The world of Thedas has very rarely felt all that immersive. If it's not the near-barren world zones that ruin the feeling, it's all the load screens you have to pass through to get anywhere. If it's not the uninspired level design, it's the day/night toggle. The Dragon Age Scenario has just never been a place that made me stop and awe at the scenery, take in the sounds, or force me to explore everything. BioWare have gotten by in recent years by crafting stories and situations that kinda make you forget that you've already been down this brown tunnel or that Orzammar only has one path running through it.

BioWare has made some of the most best-selling RPGs of all time, yet it's a company like CDProjekt (with only one previous game to their name) that brings a populated world to life, with NPCs that have jobs, actually perform those jobs, and go home at night. There are conversations, day/night cycles, lush environments, and the lore is always making an appearance. Then you have Eidos Montreal, whose first game ever just happened to be Deus Ex: Human Revolution. My point being, I don't see why BioWare has never tried to go the distance when it comes to their RPGs, specifically with Dragon Age.

Mass Effect has definitely made the attempt. Places like the Citadel from ME1 and Omega from ME2 definitely had some work put into them. I would hope the DA team puts forth equal effort for the eventual Dragon Age 3.

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So, I guess the main point of this article is: I'm dearly hoping that the DA team will actually, I don't know, try and make an RPG worthy of their reputation... and budget. You'd think that a company with six studios to their name would be able to create a product that aspires to rise above stuff like this.

9/11/01

My dad had been getting ready for work that morning. Circumstances had been such that my sister and I had been asleep in bunk beds situated right next to his. Personal circumstances, so I won't go too much into detail there. Not wanting to wake us up, he was always very quiet getting ready, and the TV was always turned down low so that we always slept through it. His routine was to watch The Today Show when he put on his shoes (and when he polished them, if it was necessary). Then he'd leave the room, grab a cup of coffee, and be off for the day.

He'd been watching the coverage for a little bit: the North Tower of the World Trade Center burning. At that point, it was some grim accident: mechanical or human error. He didn't stop getting ready; not out of insensitivity, but there was just no reason to dwell on it. It was terrible, yeah, but it's a fact of life that the world doesn't stop for terrible. There was no reason to suspect it would be anything more than what it was at that moment. The North Tower was burning, but it would surely be stopped. There would be casualties, but things would be under control before things got any further.

He tied his shoe and looked back up just in time to see United Airlines Flight 175 careening toward the South Tower. The video angle changed, and a fireball bloomed from somewhere outside the frame. At this point, you have most of waking America focused on this event, since the coverage of the damaged North Tower had begun earlier on, just before the top of the hour, and nearly every news operation on the air had been interrupted only minutes before the second plane. Many, many people saw this live. And at that point, it was pretty obvious to everyone that it wasn't technical or human error. This was intentional. We were being attacked by airliners carrying our own citizens.

Now, I can see my dad in my mind just sitting there trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. There are some things you just can't process very well so early in the morning, especially before your first cup of the day, so I can't imagine how many times he'd paused to try and think out what he should do. Apparently, he called our neighbors and a few members of our family, all of whom had already been watching as the second plane hit. Everyone was already awake to what had happened. It had been a nation-sized bucket of ice water over our collective heads.

Well, their heads. My sister and I slept. I can see my dad wondering what he should do with us, as well. He eventually decided he shouldn't worry us. He left for work and left us sleeping while, for lack of a better term, America freaked the fuck out about what was happening in New York. Things were at a fever pitch already. Thirty minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. - three miles from The White House.

While we slept, things went absolutely nuts. Commercial airliners were falling out of the sky, filled with passengers, directly into what would be considered high-priority targets. Most of the government buildings in Washington D.C. were being evacuated, complete with videos of people making their way out of The White House. This is not something you want to see when you think your country might be on the verge of war: the seat of the Executive Branch of government being emptied.

There was also a small problem at the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), which amounted to them reporting that they had been out of contact with several planes. Meaning that they had no real way of knowing how many planes had actually been hijacked or where they might be going. Major cities all over the United States went about evacuating what they deemed high-priority targets. The (formerly-named) Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois. The Los Angeles and San Francisco International Airports. Disneyland and Disneyworld in Anaheim and Orlando respectively. The Mexican border was closed. Then there was the unprecedented ground stop of all airline traffic going in, out, and through United States airspace. The US was pretty much closed for business.

It was at about this time when my mom burst in and woke us up. My mom and dad had been divorced several months back, so she had pretty much climbed through a window to get us awake and dressed, since she was minus a key to get in. Just to give you an idea of how much misinformation was flying around that day: she'd heard The White House had been hit, as well.

"We're being attacked! Come on, get out of bed and get ready!" She was pretty frantic. Kind of all over the place in terms of what needed to be done vs. what should be done. She had to run back to her house get ready for work, since she had left in a considerable hurry, but she wanted us to eat something and, oh yeah, get ready for school. Like I said: all over the place, which was especially confusing because "all over the place" she is not. But we weren't in Washington D.C. or New York. We were in California. She was kinda sure that we should still get on with business as usual. She must have flip-flopped on the school thing a dozen times before she was out the door.

I turned on the TV as she was leaving, and saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center churning out smoke for the first time. It left an impression, and it was tough to comprehend at the time. I mean, until then, I hadn't really known what the World Trade Center was - or what a "terrorist attack" was for that matter. It's the stuff a 13-year-old probably/definitely wouldn't know, so I only knew as much as the newscasters reported. We were under attack. There were people trapped on the upper floors of the towers, many were jumping out of windows 100 stories up to escape the spreading flames, some holding hands with others as they fell. I got dressed quick and started watching TV out in the living room while I waited for my mom. The South Tower collapsed about then. Not too long after, the news reported United Airlines Flight 95 had crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The North Tower collapsed just before my mom arrived to take us to school.

On the way out, the news was reporting a white airliner flying through restricted airspace over Washington D.C. The guesses at the time were actually "proven" correct later on down the line. It was a doomsday plane: a military aircraft designed during the Cold War, stocked with Air Force and government personnel, used to ensure that the government would still be able to function in the event of a large scale attack against the United States - specifically a nuclear attack.

But before being dropped off at school, we usually picked up a friend of mine since his house was along the way. I knocked on the door and he was the one to answer. I could see his family gathered around the TV in the living room. I remember feeling kinda silly when I asked him if he was going to school. He smiled and looked at me like I'd gone dumb. "Dude, have you been watching the TV?"

That look must have been what had finally done my mom in. She called at him from the car, "I'm probably going to keep them home today, too!" I took that as my cue to get back in the car. My friend grinned a little at my very obvious situation and closed the door.

We got back on the road. All of the music stations had switched over to news broadcasts, most of the chatter involving the towers' collapse, the implications, etc. The way back to my mom's house crossed several major roads through the city. I don't know if it was all in the timing, but I didn't see a single car on any road, in any direction, the entire way there.

The rest of the day involved me sitting in front of the TV trying to sort out the blur of information. The attacks ended after the collapse of the South Tower, but it didn't really feel like that. Every single minute afterward was another in which something could happen. Another plane. A bomb. We didn't really know, but we quickly discovered that we had very good imaginations.

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The US is a pretty big place, but we don't really treat it like one. We like to think that anomalies localized in one area can reoccur at any place, at any time. Looking back, I can almost kinda smile at how wacky things got during the rest of 2001. But really thinking about it helps me remember the palpable sense of fear that was literally everywhere I went. Nineteen hijackers crashed four planes on 9/11, but the way people talked, you could swear there was a terrorist just around every street corner in America.

Maybe they'd attack schools. Maybe they'd attack our school. Maybe they'd bomb a city. Maybe they'd bomb our city. They could be fucking anywhere! Even in a smallish town like mine, there was a popular rumor circulating that one of the hijackers had worked at the local post office before heading out to the east coast. This wasn't true, of course, but it was a testament to just how paranoid we became. In everyone's eyes, the next attack was aimed at them personally.

The paranoia just got worse as the days went on. The clean-up efforts in New York City painted a grim picture. When a firefighter's trapped, they can activate a device that sends out a shrill noise that helps rescue workers find them. During those first couple of days of news coverage at Ground Zero, that's all you could hear in the background. Dozens of them going off at once from somewhere in the rubble.

The anthrax attacks started no more than a week or two after 9/11, which involved a series of letters laced with deadly anthrax spores being mailed to several prominent newscasters and two US senators. Suddenly, not even the postal service was safe.

The paranoia continued to grow well into October. When Halloween came around, most parents in town were too afraid to let their kids go door to door, let alone eat candy that could be laced with deadly anthrax. My mom took my sister and I to the nearby church for Halloween, which was a first. The funny thing: it seemed like everyone else in the neighborhood had the same idea. The place was absolutely packed. Somehow, everyone got it in their head that taking their kids "trick or treating" (if wandering between candy booths can be considered such) would keep the deadly anthrax at bay. But the church did ease everyone's worries, I'll give them that.

Meanwhile, we had already invaded Afghanistan. There was very little opposition on our part.

I think we had all mentally written our government a blank check. Every time President Bush spoke, he was this unifying presence that found a way to replace our fear with something a little more productive: patriotism. It was an extreme feeling of "we're on our own." We were the target of this attack, so we have to take charge and ensure that it never happens again, subconsciously adding "whatever the cost." We wanted to do whatever it took to feel safe again, to feel like we did on September 10th: not scared of the mail, or candy, or flying, or Muslims.

What happened next is well-documented.

Mortal Kombat (1993) - The Alternative Instruktion Manual

It's no secret that one of my oldest and dearest hobbies is playing video games, and that I generally prefer the older ones: games with simple control schemes and no learning curve, which are quaint and non-threatening and which I warmly remember playing as a child. Luckily for me, my tastes are very much catered for at the moment, as the last ten years have seen a rush of revivals, re-releases and nostalgic internet musings. People of my generation are starting to look back to their pasts, and want to play Super Mario Bros. and Zelda and Goldeneye all over again. Retro is in.

But one series of games that has curiously never been re-released (not properly anyway) is Mortal Kombat - the main rival to the brilliant Street Fighter 2, which invented and simultaneously perfected the 'tournament fighter' genre.

Mortal Kombat was one of the few imitations that almost surpassed the original. It had neat graphics based on animated photographs rather that standard cartoons, it had a cool oriental theme... and it had a comical amount of blood. And death moves. By today's standards these are silly and tame, but as a small child playing these behind my parents' backs, I remember feeling a wonderful hot flush of guilt at the back of my neck.

Death. Moves. You could rip people's heads off and everything! Or at least, Gary from number 12 said he had a friend who knew how to rip people's heads off. It was a secret move which no-one really knew how to do. I just settled for an uppercut as my standard finishing move, which I pretended was fatal.

Scorpion, seen here reassuring himself that that final knee-to-the-chest probably caused internal bleeding or something, as a legion of unimpressed John Malcoviches clap politely.

So it was with enormous joy that I noticed today that whoever it is that bought up Midway have gone and released all three of the classic 2D Mortal Kombat games, in one package, on Xbox Live Arcade! Immediately I downloaded it and got to grips with a nicely-ported version of the arcade machine original. I played as Liu Kang, because I remembered how to do his moves, and bravely chose the 'normal' difficulty setting. As a kid I remember finding this game pretty tough and never daring to go higher than the insultingly-misnamed 'very easy' mode. But you know, nowadays I'm so much wiser and smarter. I have a beard of sorts. I bet now I can win it, maybe even properly!
All right, let's do this! It's time for MOOORDAL KAWMBAAAAAT! *and then techno music in my head.*

The following hour was interesting. As I played, I was mentally compiling the following instruction booklet. I wish I'd had this information available before I'd started. It might have helped me lose less.

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FIGHT!

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1. Getting Started

Thank you for your purchase, and welcome to the curious and soul-destroying world of MORTAL KOMBAT (TM)! Here at Midway we pride ourselves on not just copying Street Fighter 2 outright, but rather putting time and effort into disguising that fact, and doing all we can to piss off your parents too (yes this is the game where you can rip people's heads off, and no, this booklet will not tell you how to do that.)

First, download and open your 'Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection' virtual game pak. After maybe a hundred company credits screens, the game will begin. Now press 'Start' and try not to notice the spelling and grammar errors in the load-screen instructions. The original classic MORTAL KOMBAT is the first game available, so just hit start. Now select a difficulty. These range from 'Quite hard' through to 'Bloody hard', 'Jesus Christ this is hard', 'How do they expect children to play this?' and 'Nobody even tested this.' Choose based on your tolerance for pychological pain and hit 'Start'.


2. The Story...

The story of MORTAL KOMBAT begins many centuries ago, when the Elder Gods separated creation into several realms: Earthrealm (the Earth), Outworld (a mixed lesbian and gay nightspot which did very well for itself), Netherrealm (Hell), Edenia (paradise) and the realms of Order and Chaos (filler). Upon doing this, the Gods decreed that should one realm's rulers wish to invade another realm, then they would have to stage a martial arts tournament known as Mortal Kombat (the Elder Gods were apparently dyslexic) and have one if its representative fighters win against those representing the other realm ten times in a row. Everybody got that?

The Elder Gods figured that nobody would ever win ten in a row (like, who has the time and stuff), but failed to realise that some of their new realms would breed distinctly better fighting champions than others. As such, Edenia and Order-realm were conquered pretty quickly, and the Emporer of Outworld starting getting ideas about Earth.

Ten generations later, the Emporer found himself sitting on nine straight victories and ready for a tenth. His finest general and martial-arts master, Shang Tsung, organised the most important Mortal Kombat tournament of all: the fight for Earth. Acting quite hastily, the thunder-God Raiden assumed human form and gathered a handful of top Earth-based fighters at the absolute last minute, explaining the rules and origin of the tournament en-route. Their questions about why he hadn't warned them, trained them or prepared the Earth in any way were brushed aside as he told them something about destiny and responsibility, which they weren't listening to.

Later that day, the dazed and baffled kombatants arrive at Tsung's mysterious private island, where the tournament is about to begin...

As one of Earth's chosen warriors (the first six guys Raiden could think of, chosen on the basis that they had cool names), you must save the Earth from invasion by defeating and ideally murdering the other contestants, two ninjas, the famous Prince Goro and finally Shang Tsung himself (yes, Outworld only picked two guys to fight for it). Do you have the strength, skill and inner harmony required to defeat the deadly gauntlet... of Mortal Kombat? No.


3. The Kharacters

You will be given a choice of seven martial arts experts, representing a range of styles and cultures from across the globe. All of them posess magical powers of some kind, but weapons are not allowed, unless you're Scorpion. Scorpion has some kind of disability scam going, but the details are cloaked in mystery.

Liu Kang is the canonical hero, despite the fact that he is Bruce Lee. Aledgedly. Similarities and legal disputes aside, Liu is a brave Shaolin Monk who has entered the tournament in order to save the Earth. He wears black pants and cuts his hair short. He is Chinese, and... makes noises like Bruce Lee.

Raiden is the ancient Chinese-I-Guess God of thunder, alive inside a mortal body, sunhat, apron and white hazardous materials suit. He has the power to shoot electricity from his hands, and can hurl himself across the room like a torpedo while screaming incomprehensible faux-Chinese gibberish. This all sounds good, but remember that he and his hand-picked elite squads have so far failed to win a single tournament out of the last ten. Might not want to bet on this guy.

Johnny Cage... looks nothing like you remembered. You were expecting a cool guy in sunglasses and black trousers, right, like in the movie? The real Johnny wears wierd pirate shorts with a sash, squats with his legs apart and hands up as if he's about to do the Walk Like an Egyptian dance, and his face is oddly long and serious-looking.

Sonya Blade is the girl. Got to have a girl. If she gets you with the sweep kick, she will automatically do this annoying move with her legs, thus effectively sweeping you twice. Also she is an FBI agent. For some reason she is wearing lime-green exercise gear.

Sub-Zero is a ninja who dresses in sky-blue and posesses the ability to freeze solid matter, but sadly not the ability to come up with a subtle or creative nickname. His freeze-move is extremely useful as it is hard to block and slows down the combat for a few precious moments.

Scorpion is exactly like Sub-Zero except that he wears yellow instead of blue, and he shoots an Inspector Gadget-style harpoon from his hand and yells 'Get ooover here!' in a deep American accent, thus overshadowing the obvious palette-swap effect by being the most fun character in the game. Like the freeze move, the Harpoon is much more helpful than most special moves.

Kano has a metal plate covering his glowing red eye, throws magic knives and in the film seemed to be a Cockney crime boss. However, is is rubbish.


4. How to Play

After you have selected your fighter, your opponents will be laid out in order of difficulty, and the easiest one will immediately begin kicking the everliving crap out of you. Don't worry - you paid your ten bucks, so you have unlimited continues! During the ensuing defeats you will learn that every fighter is able to high-kick, low-kick, furiously wail on the other guy with fast punches, sweep kick, block, perform specific special moves and of course... uppercut.

There are three ways to win a fight. Any other stretagy will fail.

1) Be Sub-Zero or Scorpion, and thus have an easy special move which incapacitates the other guy for a second. Abuse the hell out of this move. Shout 'Get oooover here!' to amuse yourself, but remember this is still no guarantee of victory in the cruel world of Mortal Kombat. The first time someone blocks your harpoon and proceeds to brutalise you in revenge, your heart will break.
2) Wail on that impossibly-fast jackass with high punches every time he gets close to you. You will look silly, but maybe you'll win and the game will not laugh at you or loudly applaud your defeat (it does this a lot).
3) Play the uppercut and sweep game. Once you're fairly close to your opponent, he will try to sweep-kick you. The trick is to be slightly too far away and then walk towards him to deliver the uppercut. And vice versa - that is, if he tries to uppercut, you sweep the leg, Johnny, and you sweep it good. Be aware that he will be trying the same thing. Don't keep trying to do one or the other - you must alternate between both moves.

If you do win, you will hear a deep voice cry, 'Finish him!' (regardless of your opponent's gender) and be allowed to perform a finishing move! You have half a second to do it, and the instructions (on the pause menu) are tiny, complex and incomprehensible. You will likely never accomplish this.

Every few levels you will be granted a bonus round. Here you will hear the deep voiced guy say, 'Test your might!' and in the following 0.034 seconds you must tap the punch button until you have built up enough power to hit 'block' and thus shatter a piece of wood before your power sinks back down. You will never accomplish this. The game is just trying to demoralise you.

At one point, you'll fight on The Pit Stage. This is a stage set on a thin stone bridge over a pit of spikes. The winner here is able to actually perform a finishing move, by simply uppercutting the loser and thus dropping him onto the spikes. This feels amazing and makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Liu Kang: "I'm doing it! I'm actually doing it!!"

Once five of your opponents have been beaten and one unfortunate soul has been thrown on the spikes, you will enter what the tournament spectators lovingly call 'The Padding':

- First the Mirror Match! You must fight an identical copy of yourself for unknown reasons. Here the game is able to dispel the false belief you have built up, that you are playing with any degree of skill. The computer-controlled copy will demonstrate how you were supposed to be playing this whole time, until you either replicate his inhumanly-fast style or get lucky with the sweeps and uppercuts.
- Then you will face the first Endurance fight! Here you fight two of the other fighters back to back! This is, as you would imagine, twice as hard as what you've been doing so far. Time to up your game, chum.
- Twenty minutes later, you face another Endurance fight! Same as before. You might want to get a cup of coffee or something. Count youself lucky you're not playing this on an arcade in the mid 90's, feeding a limitless supply of 50ps into it just so that maybe you can get to the next round, which is...
- Another fucking Endurance fight. You have now fought everyone twice, including the guy you killed earlier. You may begin to question the alledged 'mortality' of the Kombat at this point.


5. Almost There! Except...

Once you defeat the Padding, you will notice that you are shaking, exhausted and sporting a healthy stubble. Well done: this is the mark of a true Mortal Kombat player! You are now ready for the two final challenges - Outworld's two greatest fighters! The battle to save all of mankind!

But never mind that shit - here comes GORO!

Just another day for Goro. Here he is, preparing to crucify Scorpion with nothing but his bare fists and the air. The bones belong to Chuck Norris.

Goro is a half-man, half-dragon. Like Johnny Cage, he looks nothing at all like how you remember him or how he looked in the movie. He fights you outside a cave with glowing monster eyes peeping out from the darkness, and he is enormous and has four arms. You can't knock him over by uppercutting or sweeping, and he can kill you in three or four hits. Also, he growls constantly. Like, constantly. You grow to really resent that.

Goro's special moves include punching you so hard it kills you whilst growling, grabbing hold of you, growling and punching you multiple times and betting on whether you die on an even or odd number, throwing you so hard you lose consciousness and then punching you and growling, shooting a fireball which melts your flesh before it even hits you, jumping onto your head and stomping your body into a fine dust which he then sets sets fire to and stomps on all over again to put it out, and growling as he makes a sandwich out of your lungs, which he then serves to his giant, four-armed mates, who immediately punch the sandwich so hard it flies into outer space and burns up in the sun and then the sun explodes from the sheer force of the punch. Goro's salary is paid in 50ps.

This guy has been fighting Goro for less than a second, and already has no skin. This is a slow day for Goro, but don't worry - he's apparently about to bring about armageddon.

The final stage is Shang Tsung himself. No-one knows who he is, because no-one has ever defeated Goro. It's rumoured that he may be the the old man you see in the background on some levels, but nobody knows or cares any more.

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At this point, I would like to say that I'm only kidding. Mortal Kombat has a strange and amusing storyline and it's unbelievably hard when you reach the later stages, and Goro, but hey. It's an arcade game, what did I expect? And its a damn good arcade game, too. The moody, vaguely-Chinese-mythological setting and music are fun and atmospheric, the uppercuts feel great, the Pit Stage is wonderful and the fatalities, should you ever get them to work, make you feel on top of the world. This nostalgic classic does hold up, after all this time, even now that the novelty and controversy of the blood has worn off. And it was worth buying just to have another crack at Goro. Besides, the difficulty level helps to create the sense of doom and dark fantasy that this whole experience is built on.

Maybe if I try 'very easy' mode, eh?

I recommend the new release: Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection. Just... don't expect to win. Ripping people's heads off may be possible with practice.

And as I remember things, the second game was much better! I got MK2 and 3 as part of this deal, so I look forward to testing them too. In the mean time, remember...

YOUR BROTHER'S SOUL IS MINE!

Film Review - Attack the Block

Why is it that the films with the best acting and most carefully-written scripts are always the ones with the lowest budgets, regardless of genre? Well I suppose not always, but still. Sometimes. And it's annoying.

This summer I watched a whole lot of action movies at the cinema, starting with Pirates of the Carribean 4, going through just about every superhero origin story you can name and ending with a cheerfully-ridiculous re-make of Conan the Barbarian. None of them were bad, exactly, not even Conan, but none save the surprisingly great X-Men First Class seemed to have had any particular effort put into their stories. Again, I liked all of them, but every one had the kind of script that would pass a creative writing class but wouldn't exactly make its author into the star pupil. They had lead actors who were basically coasting and collecting the big cheque at the end (Ryan Reynolds, Natalie Portman, even Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig) - not doing a bad job by any stretch, but not exactly going for awards. Nobody involved in any of these films seemed to really give a crap.

And then you have Attack the Block. I hadn't even heard of this thing, and I only rented it because it had a cameo from Nick Frost (of Edgar Wright / Simon Pegg fame). I rented it along with Priest, in fact, and saved Attack the Block 'til after the feature presentation, as a last minute thought before bed. I suppose I just answered my own question from the top of this page, right? But my point is that unlike the movies mentioned above (except X-Men, loved that one) this one was... not brilliant exactly, but it was something. Not a sequel or a remake or a concept - but a story.

That story sounds daft: this is a movie where alien monsters (which look exactly like the DVD cover of the movie Wilderness) land in a London housing estate and it's up to a bunch of semi-dangerous teenaged thugs to stop them, once they realise they are the ones being hunted. And Nick Frost appears in it, and it's written/directed by Joe Cornish from The Adam and Joe Show (one of my earliest memories of alternative comedy - they did crude, dumb sketches with Star Wars figures and plush toys, I loved it but I was very young. This was back when Channel 4 was good and... gave a crap. Hm.) So you'd be expecting a silly film here. A farcical parody, like Shaun of the Dead but worse. Or at least, that's what I was expecting.



But actually, I can't honestly say it's a comedy. It's funny, but not all the time, and only with the side-characters. Neither is this a horror, despite the Alien-like aliens who stalk our 'heroes' through their block of flats and the surrounding neighbourhood (more on this later) using all the traditional scary-monster horror movie tricks. And the aliens are not our focus, and there is real drama in there, so I guess we have to just call this a 'low-budget British sci-fi action film'. That's going to make it hard to recommend to people, which is a shame because it deserves to be seen.

The aliens in the film are awful. They are CG-made, cut-and-paste identical "big gorilla wolf motherfuckers" (I loved that line) whose presumably hairy bodies are so black that they appear like pure shadows (or indeed unshaded cartoons) with luminous cyan teeth. Despite the very unique and fun reason for them being here, and the scary, animalistic behaviour they exhibit, it is impossible to be scared by this effect. And any other low-budget British horror/ SF / comedy might have been ruined by this restriction, but not this one.

What makes this work is not the horror-style, the SF concept or the jokes, but the carefully-written characters and the cast of teenage lads who fill this film with some of the best acting you'll ever see in an action movie. Hell, in any movie - this is proper acting. I wonder how much they got paid for this, and then how much the cast of Thor got.

It's a simple basis, but deeper than you might think: teenage and mostly black gang members are running from alien monsters. But those teens (and the middle-class characters around them) are interesting, realistic and layered. And every one of them is a complex satire or social commentary. Aside from one or two smaller parts, none of these young people is wholly likable or loathsome. They're not there to lampoon or beg sympathy, but to represent a point of view. And each has a personality, too. I wish we had time to learn more about them, a feeling that came to me very strongly in the third act when we are given (slightly clichéd) glimpses into our lead, Moses' home. I wasn't expecting to care about him so much, and that really impressed me.


Incidentally, I don't mean to imply that the aliens chases are laughable, or that the comedy doesn't work. There is menace when the aliens strike, despite their appearance, and some of the comedy is brilliant. (This is too much madness to fit into one text, bruv!) And the two little boys following the gang around are particularly funny. But what so surprised me and so thrilled me here is the drama. It's obvious that Joe from the Adam and Joe Show really cared about these characters and worked damn hard at them. Same for the actors: Moses is played very well by John Boyega. I never quite hated that character, and never quite pitied him either. Brilliant.

This silly-looking film with drug-dealing, teen muggers fighting aliens is about something, and the kids are neither hilariously inept chavs nor lionised gangsters. They're a group of characters who almost never get a realistic portayal in film, and they're done very well. The movie is flawed, by the way, but there's something unique and great about it. Captain America was good, you know. I liked that a lot. X-Men, I think I mentioned, was great. So was Attack the Block.

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And did you know that Bucky, Captain America's sidekick, is so-nicknamed because his middle-name is Buchanan? And that my name is Buchanan and nickname is 'Buch' (pronounced 'Buck')? It's true! And on this site, I'm sort of the sidekick to an American! Spooky.