Army of Two

The Middle Ages: serfs and knights, kings and barons, hovels and castles. Trebuchets and portcullises, battering rams. Boiling hot pitch and men swinging on chandeliers with swords. The plague. Really, really bad medicine.

There were so many ways you could die horribly in the Middle Ages that people started strolling around in huge suits of armour. Or riding horses clad in more protective metal than the average sports car nowadays.

You've got to love the way the human race really enjoys shortening its own lifespan. As a race, we completely embody that scene from Indiana Jones where the guy twirls his sword for ages and Indy just shoots him.

When someone comes along and says, "Haha! I've got armour! You can't kill me with that axe now!" Someone else - perhaps with that same Indiana Jones world-weary look - promptly invents the gun.

Pimp my Armour, coming soon! Presented by Richard Holmes!

When the person in the armour staggers away, badly injured, jumps into their castle and yells, "Yeah well, I'm surrounded by thick bloody walls now! A castle - like architectural armour!"

Someone else sighs, yawns and just makes the gun bigger. Like really big. And shoots a massive hole in the castle.

Now, we've got weapons that destroy whole cities and no-one - the world over- dare twirl their sword too much.

Army of Two's whole premise - in terms of the actual action - is the idea that hundreds of years of technological progress hasn't occurred and armour still works. This means that two steroid-chugging American mercenaries (one big and butch and HARDCORE GUNPLAY, BITCH, one whiney and slight and a bit I WANNA BE A IN A BAND) dropped into the middle of an entire country of enemy troops can kill their way out of it with ease and take dozens of bullets to a metal hockey mask - at close range, no less - without curling their lip with exertion.

Real modern-day armour.

ARMY OF TWO!!!!!!'s version.

Obviously this is a fallacy on some hitherto un-reaped level of ridiculous. Real PMC's must - I assume - have a significant technological edge over insurgent forces in the Third World, be it with communications, air and artillery support, spy drones and intelligence of the real "They are the little men over there" kind.

However, I imagine the real difference is that whereas your average insurgence is rather chaotic and badly organised, the PMC's have years of combat experience and are - on a purely tactical level - better at the bangers and mash of soldiery.

The comparison - and again, this is an assumption - I imagine one could draw is that of a SWAT team or Armed Response Unit going up against a load of bank robbers.

The idea of a game where you out-strategise a far numerically superior force of insurgent rebels is an intriguing one. Perhaps something akin to GRAW only, you know, more intensely tactical like a Swat game.

Real Private Military Contractors.

Army of Two!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'s version

Army of Two simply boils down all this rather interesting potential to - as mentioned - your avatars wearing huge amounts of metal clobber which is capable of taking an insane amount of punishment, including the legendary hockey masks and - my personal favourite- a codpiece with MERC etched on it, visible in the above picture. It makes for a fairly arresting image, I suppose, and that's what game marketing is all about but its very, very silly.

So is pimping a diamond studded shield to a bright gold assault rifle, adding a barrel three quarters of a mile long, and - just for good measure - sticking a shotgun front piece on it. Sadly, this is what you have to do if you want your weaponry to have any effect more permanent than a mild bruise.

Fortunately, by the time you complete the first level, you should have enough money to buy a SAW with an extended 120 round clip. And then the rest of the game is pretty easy.

The other selling point of the game is the fact that it was apparently built from the ground up for two player co-op. This is why my friend and I bought it and played it. I know nothing of the single-player experience and care not a jot. I wanted co-op. Like Gears of War's brilliant two-player mode but even more so.

Sadly, the simplest way to describe the extreme disappointment of the co-op in Army of Two is to say, should you want a two-player, split-screen, same room experience, you're still better off with getting Gears.

The trouble is largely how Army of Two forces you to play. It wants one player to build up all the Aggro, go bright red like a well-flogged penis, and get the attention of every single soldier on the level. Then, your mate is nice and opaque and can sneak around the side of the enemy.

"Flame on!"
"Shut up, man!"

The fact of the matter is, as much as my friend and I tried it, the central gameplay is not only broken - and it is, fundamentally so - but actually no more effective that taking the levels conventionally, just clearing stage by stage of enemies in as natural a way as you would.

Now, its not the case that we simply weren't good enough at the game, my friend has completed it - on the hardest difficulty - on his own and I'm not too shabby either. It worked out that, once the invisibility thing was working and the Aggro was all on me (Mr Saw), my friend (Mr Death Whisper) would sneak round the flank and open up. However, the AI immediately notices when some of its men are being wasted. They run away and open fire at the previous invisible mate and the Aggrometer at the side of the screen does a crazy swing-dance, unable to decide who deserves more attention.

The other thing is that you don't build up Aggro simply by shooting (as I had imagined), you can pour hundreds of rounds at targets but gain nothing in the way of the little red bar if you don't hit anything. You need to be accurate, which means taking time over your shots which means not killing quick enough to necessarily build up Aggro. Surely, your huge weight of fire should act as suppression (a tactic the game could have happily plagiarised from Brothers in Arms) and gain Aggro accordingly.

Also - there's this stupid game-play conceit where if you build up enough Aggro, you unlock a special Overkill mode. The Aggro-ised player gets double damage and Mr Death Whisper can run right up to the enemy and hit them in the face with the car door, or race around the rear of one of the game's extraordinarily irritating, heavily armoured (of course) MG emplacements and shoot the absolutely hell out of the gunner.

Of course, apart from a few choke-points in the game's badly designed interior levels where the power up is basically obligatory to progress - you only ever get Overkill when you've basically cleared the room anyway. Meaning one final little Muslim terrorist gets the full brunt of the ARMY OF TWO!!!

Having burnt the inconsequential witch of Main Gameplay at the stake, its time to discuss the other ways EA tries to cram the Two Player-ness down your throat.

1/ Every door needs you and your partner to press A simultaneously. Sometimes this means both pressing a button at the same time. Suggesting that Al Queda always expected to be attacked by someone playing an FPS not - conveniently for you - an ARMY OF TWO!!!! Most of the time, though, it leads to a cutscene where, together, with the strength afforded to them merely because they are AN ARMY OF TWO, Mr Big and Mr Suicide-Girls tear the doors out of the way. Variously - elevator doors, the walls of a metal cage where Mr Escort Mission has been kept for years and, best of all, the exterior hull door of an aircraft carrier.

2/ At any point, you can go over to your partner and press A to handshake or air guitar or, ludicrously, have the big guy sing, "Salem, Salem, Salem" to the theme of Rawhide. This serves no purpose. Alternatively, if you're, for whatever reason, pissed off with your partner and unable to convey this in real life - via microphone or a sneaky on-the-sofa elbow nudge or shrieked cursing-their-incompetence - you can press Right Trigger and, in the game, slap them round the head or head butt them. Its pointless and, honestly, you simply won't ever do it, unless you're pissing about and want to get your partner killed and so activate the little dance routines mid-combat.

If you do wish to use them, its better to wait until you you hear the end of combat, GOW-style gong of "Everyone's been fucked up, bro!"

You can also swap guns. You will never do this.

3/ Co-Op sniping. The sniper rifles are the most supremely useless weapons in the games. Save yourself the shitty bother of these unskippably bad bits and just nominate one guy to fire twice.

4/ Co-Op parachuting. One guy directs the chute, one guy snipes. As I've said, the sniper rifles are useless and you're generally shooting moving targets while swinging about like a huge, erect penis beneath a parachute canopy. In fact, I think this only happens two or three times in the game, as if the designers realised how awful it is. The most protracted sequence sees you jumping off a cliff using a parachute someone Mr Escort Mission has conveniently left at the edge of said cliff. After which, you clearly hang-glide for ages through endless Afghan caverns with the parachute obstinately refusing to act even a little like a real one.

"Weeeee-" "Shut up, man!"

5/ Step-Up. In which you engage in face-off break dancing with Islamic fundamentalist dance troops from across the see-through global conspiracy.

Of course not. That'd be a pathetic attempt at silliness in this well-grounded, well-structured, thinking man's action title.

At points in the game, the stairs have been shot away. A single man could not traverse such an obstacle but you ARE THE ARMY OF TWO. One man lifts the other, he pokes his head up, checks for targets, shoots the absolute putrefied shit out of them if they're there, then clambers up. He reaches down and pulls you up.

Its pointless and boring and happens with that sort of Only-In-A-Game frequency that makes you roll your eyes and pierce your foreskin with needles full of The Cancer.

The mask not only stops bullets, it apparently stops you from being deafened, too.

6/ You drive a hover boat together. In the Kill The Asians level, its really crap and the water effects are straight out of the PS2. In the Kill Fellow Americans level, its better but - wherever you are - its unremittingly dull.

7/ Back-to-Back modes that, as far as I can, try to replicate the end of Doug Liman's Mr and Mrs Smith to the point it might be an overt reference. These are shit. The sooner you can detach from it and return to the cover hiding normal action the better.

"Cheek to cheek-" "Shut up, man!"

About that, actually. Not having a button to bind you do cover is actually a really irritating hindrance. You very rarely bind when you don't want you, yes, but when you do want to, you end up ducking and running straight into the sandbag wall or whatever until the game decides what to do with you.

And that's, uh, it. When your partner dies, you can drag them about and heal them. Often, its easier just to clear the area as quick as you can and then find them. Unfortunately, this whole aspect of the game is marred by the fact that, if you do die, you then instantly jump back up and sprawl into the sitting position in which the dragging animation actually works.

"He ain't heavy, he's my-" "Shut up, man!"*

As you play Army of Two, you never really feel like the game has embraced its own hype. There's nothing you do that makes you particularly act at a team. Indeed, with the constant Kill Tallies and remarkably unfunny banter, you can feel like two guys in complete competition at times. As the friend with whom I played this mediocre-at-best title with said, "I was expecting their constant insulting of one another to come to a head or something. But nothing happens."

In fact, an end level where you fight each other - finally driven apart by Mr Eat Bauer For Breakfast's insistence to occasionally trip Mr Fallout Boy over as they enter a room (do mercenaries really do that in hostile zones?) - would have been amazing. Certainly better than the storyline of the game which is, well... there isn't one. There just isn't.

Any attempt to build on the characters at all would have been welcome. Any suggestion that being a mercenary wasn't sunshine, lollipops and blood drenched, high-paying rainbows would have been great.

Instead, the game simply flits from one hoo-aah to another, killing the usual tick list of current foreign threats. And you wear fucking armour.

Things that are this stupid are at least generally quite big. Army of Two is criminally short. I reckon that you and a committed friend will take two afternoons at most to play through this. After you do so, I doubt you'll feel an urge to play any more. The more you play, the more you find the game hateful and annoying.

This was such a good idea. A two player game with ground-up co-op, based around the morally very dark grey area of Private Military Contractors, not without a sense-of-humour... it could have been hopelessly terrific. The trouble is that without a story to speak of, you have to focus on the combat and, sadly, the combat is utterly banal and lifeless.

Also, shooting suicide bombers in the chest. A game dynamic even Uwe Boll would probably call fucking retarded.

The only really exciting bit is some FMV with a jet plane. That says a lot.


*Banter in these captions is guaranteed 120% more witty than any incongruous discussions about the Wu-Tang clan and the NFL.
----

Jachap has handies of two, right at the end of his armies.

Bully or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Shooting Small Girls in the Neck with Bottles

You may remember, reader, that I traded this...

"I gave her the finger. She bled to death in twelve seconds."

For this....

"I gave him the finger. He stuck me in detention."

A better choice I have seldom made in my short life's comings and goings. If there is one single problem with Assassin's Creed, it's that it sorely lacks fun. Its full of frustration and boredom and tedious repetition.

"Oh, gee, Dude, that first view of Damascus, oh man, it made me wanna jizz." "Totally, bro."

"IN BULLY I STUFFED A KID IN A BIN!"

Here's the crux of what I'm trying to say:

IN BULLY

I STUFFED

A KID

IN A BIN

It's just pure, silly fun, from start to finish. There's no silly sci-fi, there's no layer upon layers of reality and you can't jump off very high towers. Bully may not be particularly clever, but it's a game that loves you. A game that wants you to play it and have a good time.

The loving carress of Bully is so much more appealing than Assassin Creed's insistence on slapping you around the face at every opportunity.

All those interminable, non interactive cut scenes... In Bully the cutscenes but they're skippable (always a good choice) but they're actually mildly amusing to watch if you don't skip them. The humour can be misfiring at times but even misfiring humour is better than the staid, dour discussion of Middle Eastern socio-politics every single chat in Assassin's Creed seems to become.

In Assassin's Creed, you are constantly chased by guards, muslims, Crusaders (and, perhaps the game's worst idea - tramps) in Bully you are similarly pursued by Prefects and teachers and greasers. Not every chase becomes the same irritating block-block-kill swordfight. You can outrun your pursuers. Generally, the teachers get tried and give up. Alternatively, you can outwit them quite neatly and give them the slip by doubling-back or sprinting down a short cut they can't reach.

This, again, is infinitely preferable to the belief shattering instances in Creed where you sit on a bench and everyone quietly forgets about you.

Total Film employ an entertainment graph, charting an audience's approximate reaction to a film's highs and lows. It'd be interesting to apply this to games. Certainly, in Bully, every chase nudges your enjoyment up just a little. It's a short adrenaline rush before returning you to the game proper.

In Assassin's Creed, I found all too often, the chase resulted in the termination of the level and, subsequently, all enjoyment.

In Bully, if you get caught, you can hammer Y to escape. You stomp on toes and grab a handful of scrote and flee. You have literally minutes to escape in.

If you can caught - the penalty is not death. You simply get slightly relocated - you may fail the mission a bit - or dragged to class.

This is a game that thrives on giving the player second chances to remedy their mistakes. And that punishment, going to class... well, that's actually fun too.

It should have been a case of "Fucking mini-games!" but the tasks are simple, diverting and actually a little addictive. I became something of a star pupil for a while, trying to complete them. Nicely, and in keeping with the game's very laid-back massage of the player, there's very little in the way of penalties for totally messing up.

In Biology, you dissect animals. In Geography, you have to label countries. Music is a rhythm game. They're all fun to do. If you complete them, you do get certain bonuses (back to this in a moment).

Failing missions. Another aspect of both games where we can draw a direct comparison. In Bully, I failed about three and completed them on a second or third attempt. The game really feels as if it's trying to help you, not setting out to defeat you, to stumble you and nudge you off that last rooftop before the Assassin's Bureau... into the path of forty-five enraged infidel invaders, you then hack your way through.

Another example: all games like this have their collectibles. It seems to be something that died out for a while but is now back with a vengeance. There's always laptops to discover or packages on top of the buildings to pick up. Crackdown actually made it an absolute crucial part of the gameplay (and, in my opinion, that really worked).

Most collectible based side-quests (if they really warrant the term) are walkthrough-requiring, nagging, horrible bits of padding. The flags in Assassin's Creed are useless and snucked away in little nooks you'd never actually have a reason to visit in the game properly. I genuinely believe that you have to be wired differently, as a person, to want to hunt such things out.

TRADE THIS IN FOR BULLY

In Bully, if you complete Geography, it unlocks the locations of the collectibles on your minimap, meaning you essentially have a built in guide to finding them. Like the greyed locations in Fallout 3, this is actually a huge encourage to explore and find the things. More games should do this.

In general terms, Bully's learning curve is so meanderingly slight, its really less of a curve, more of a lean. Its like one of the cool kids, foot jacked up against the wall, propped in the corner looking moody and dangerous.

In short, it's easy. For some reason, the word "easy" has negative connotations.

Easy women are riddled with disease. Easy money is to be treated suspiciously, it's how the shadowy cousin who you never see at Christmas can afford that new Jag. Easy decisions spell catastrophe. Easy games are to be feared like casual racism or the Bubonic Plague.

I think the reasoning for this is that people assume, if a game is easy, the player will simply breeze through it. If there's no challenge, surely it's boring?

You can actually apply that exact criticism to Assassin's Creed. The fact I can hold three buttons, choose a direction, and the game will happily do the rest - is boring. It's actually disappointing. If there's no challenge to climbing that tower, if scaling it is not an act of player skill, then what's the point?

I would generally think, "God, this is easy," immediately before slipping off that final rooftop. The arbitrary spikes of difficulty, secreted in the game, that feel almost exactly like running hard into a thick, unrelenting wall.

In Bully, there is too much to do and too much fun to be had. The ease in which you complete tasks feels like a triumph in the design of the levels and the design of interface.

TRADE THIS IN FOR BULLY

It's impossible to categorise Bully into a "Its a bit like X or Y, with a dash of Z." Particularly in terms of finding a game with a comparative difficulty level. It's an Open World game and we've basically all had enough of them now, but, because it features a smaller play area full of incident and character (as opposed to vast expanses of open ground full of exactly nothing) it transcends the form.

Allow me to get a little wanky for a moment. Bully was not comparable to my usual game-playing experience. My standard operating procedure, in the form of a stream of conciousness, is as follows:

"DIE DIE DIE RUN PRESS A ARGH WANKER DIE RELOAD SHIT ON ME RELOAD YOU FUCK DIE DIE DIE DUCK DUCK JUMP - Phew. Cutscene - WHAT THE FUCK NO SKIP WANNA SKIP DIE DIE DIE DIE CAN'T SHOOT BUGGER"

Bully, by comparison, was more a warm feeling as one might feel at the end of a rather spiffing summer day. It was a fun, gentle, endearing experience. It was refreshing not to obsess over the difficulty, over sudden cul-de-sacs in the game's progress where you die over and over and over again, and just enjoy the experience.

Indeed, it will always be a puzzle to me why some people obsess over difficulty so much...

"I completed it on Legendary."
"Oh, I did it on Normal."
"YOU FUCKING SUCK!"
"I have several other endeavours in my life that I prioritise above game completion!"
"YOU. FUCKING. SUCK."

This XBox Live, Gamerpoint, One UpManship has always irritated me.

Unless the difficulty settings add something to the missions (Hello, Mr TimeSplitters, Monsieur Goldeneye) or are cleverly assessed (Good morrow to you, Dr Call of Duty 4 OBE) or, in fundamental ways, utterly affect the game (Great to see you, Madame Crysis, Lord Flashpoint) - surely the game should have one single setting. The "Just Challenging Enough" setting. Anything below this is just patronising.

This difficulty setting is for players who have never held a controller before and, up until this point, thought Solitaire and Minesweeper were the only computer games that existed.

Anything above? Masochism, pure and simple.

I don't want to get stuck in a bin by a game and pissed on by all the cool kids. I want to chortle away happily, as I'm the one who deals out the punishment.

Hello there, Monsieur Crackdown and young Bully, esquire. Its an absolute pleasure.

It really, really is.

Let's have a few more games where I can, in a gameplay sense, stick people in bins.

-----

Jachap found all the rubber bands.

Ain't Got Time to Creed

I like the trade-in culture of console gaming a lot. Not so long ago, as an exclusively PC boy, it was a bit alien to me. Not ET alien. Not Alien alien. Maybe something more along the lines of Mike and Angelo. A bit odd but not wholly unappealing.

Many of the electronic boutiques (capitalised and not) near me simply wouldn't take in PC games.

These days, I find myself in the blessed situation of, having bought a few pre-owned games when I first got my 360, being able to basically recycle that same £40 or so, over and over.

I bought Dead Rising and found that, without a big TV, it was basically unplayable - something I really should have gathered from Nick's review (which lurks downstairs somewhere like a feeble-minded but ultimately well-meaning goblin).

I didn't play it enough to fully understand what's happening here.

I traded in Dead Rising for GRAW2 and a great deal of enthusiasm for Valve's up-coming Left 4 Dead.

I completed Ghost Recon Advanced Warrior (is that right?) Two, in a little less time than it takes for me to say its name. Though enjoyable, I had no particular interest in playing it again. Those bits in films where the Marine Corps get together and shout, "Hoo-ahh," at one another make me squirm and GRAW2, every now and again, felt like a protracted session in the company of such men.

"Hoo-ah!... Anyone? Anyone at all? Anyone wanna hoo-ah?"

I traded it in for Bioshock and, whatever praise and criticism one could plausibly heap on that particular title, I got a resounding impression - as I played it - that I wouldn't want to give it another go. I would end up dissecting it, analysing it too much and, ultimately, ruining it.

Preferring to retain that original sense of shock and awe, I traded Bioshock in for Assassin's Creed.

There was some furore (in the purely, circle-jerk/circle-slap internet sense) over Assassin's Creed. Penny Arcade valiantly defended it despite large amounts of middling scores, claiming that reviewers, in the rushed necessity of having to review the game, missed what's fun about it. The hours you can spend hopping about the Middle East, climbing stuff and blending into crowds.

"You can't possibly understand what's it like to be an American several hundred years before the country was even discovered!"

Now, undeniably, Assassin's Creed does excel in this area. My housemate spent a whole day doing exactly that, just running about, picking fights with guards and dancing away, chirping merrily to himself. The joy of catching archers unawares with the hidden blade takes a long time to abate.

"I have terrible vertigo and the Guild just don't care."

But the game is also, undeniably, crippled in certain areas. The sci-fi framing of the entire story is a mistake so woeful it is genuinely hard to see how it ever made it into a game so technically staggering. They spent a lot of time making every rooftop in Damascus look different but they didn't realise the bit where you quit out of the fun just to go and take a nap (press X for instant REM sleep! Tap A to control snoring!) was utterly wretched?

"Garrett has cooler hair than me."

In fact, the whole story-telling technique of the game is abysmal. Bioshock was not extraordinarily subtle where this is concerned, either, but it handled itself with a certain amount of aplomb and I'm a sucker for aplomb. On top of that, it very rarely put the game on pause to tell you a story. You could listen to everything while on the move, while fighting Splicers, while getting on with something.

In Assassin's Creed, every time you wish to speak to an NPC, you have to pull up a chair and make sure you're sitting comfortably. Brilliantly, there's an option to press a button at certain points to zoom in on the un-convincing facial grimaces of the speaker, thus seamlessly combining endless, un-entertaining cutscenes with that other element of modern games that everyone loves: the quick time event. And so, the coffin is sealed on the whole sorry affair. Back to the Gamestation it is.

"I'm allergic to horses but do they care? No."

That's too rash, obviously.

What seals the coffin on Assassin's Creed is the sneering unlikeable whine of the lead character, the pathetic simplicity of the combat and the realisation you should probably have, unless you're Penny Arcade - about halfway through - that you're not really playing the game. To move Altaire around, you press and hold three buttons and choose a direction.

Unless you pick a staggeringly stupid direction, Altaire can basically go anywhere and climb anything. Its strange, at first, the way the game forces you to act like a puppeteer. Its enticingly novel. But the detachment it creates is, in the end, what killed the game, stuck it longboat and set fire to it for me.

All this stuff about player immersion and then Ubisoft go out to make a game that keeps forcing you outside of the character, outside of the primary world and - for good measure, or maybe out of spite - outside of the secondary world too.

"I didn't even wanna play It."

And all you want to do, as you sit on the fiftieth bench and listen to some guy with a beard witter on forever with none of the humour of, say, NOLF all you want to do is scream, "This isn't Brecht. This isn't fun. Technical accomplishment aside, this is the absolute epitome of mediocre and it makes me want to drive forks into the squidgy gaps between my toes."

And so, finally, a couple of days ago, I traded in Assassin's Creed for Bully.

"Hooah!"




"Guys?"






"...so alone."

------

Jachap is still not sure whether that title pun works on any level.

Books Overlooked #3

Good lord, I've only done two of these before now? But I have so many OPINIONS!

Doctor Strange: The Oath
Marvel
Story: Brian K. Vaughan
Art: Marcos Martin

Doctor Strange? Isn't he just that dude they drag in whenever they need another Avenger to fill out the ranks? Yes, it is. But once upon a time, when Steve Ditko and Stan Lee came up with him, he had a backstory and themes and motivations. Nowadays he's just there for somebody to say 'why can't you sort this Skrull business out, Steven' to him, so he can reply 'oh because the ancient ones and the scrolls and such and I'm just tired, okay?'

But since he's been drafted in to do that so often, Marvel's senior editorial staff realised 'oh crap, we haven't given the bastard his own solo series in like five years', and got one of comics' greatest current writers (or 'The BKV' as he's known) to throw together a quick five-issue miniseries to give the readers some idea of what Doctor Strange is about. The result: pure gold.

The good thing about Strange not having his own series for so long is that Vaughan can throw everything cool about the character into this one project in a big wonderful slurry of magical medical drama. The pacing's excellent, the characters are well-written, and the intro involves Strange being dragged, unconscious and gut-shot, into a secret superhero doctor's surgery. The charater of Strange is brilliantly conveyed, portraying him as a conflicted servant of humanity, rather than the more typical frowning mystic role he seems to take on. Instantly gripping, and beautifully rendered by Marcos 'Why The Hell Aren't I Drawing A Protracted Run On Batman By Now I Mean For God's Sake Batgirl Year One Was Bloody Transcendent' Martin. We can only hope Vaughan and Martin team up again, because in addition to all the rest, this series stands as a testament to the absolute synergy (hnnng) of their creative talents.

Planet Hulk
Marvel
Story: Greg Pak
Art: Carlo Pagualayan, Aaron Lopresti and others

This is the story of the Hulk, and how he finally came home, as the blurb goes. While most Marvel fans were griping about the ineffectual writing, limp character development and extensive tie-ins that plagued the main event of two years ago, Civil War, the smart money was on Greg Pak's not-always-excellent, but consistently-entertaining single-title year-long epic - Planet Hulk.

The run-up to the series ran thus: after fleeing to peaceful mountainous fishing country to escape causing trouble with his big green alter-ego (who now sports a big green Hulk-beard, facial-hair-fans), Bruce Banner lives in peace until Nick Fury, Director Of SHIELD, tracks him down and enlists him to sort out a phony satellite problem, with the ultimate goal of shooting him into space. You see, Fury, along with Mister Fantastic, Iron Man and numerous others, decided that the Hulk was just too dangerous to have around, and planned to send him to a tranquil, wild planet, where he wouldn't be any hazard to sentient life. However, something goes screwy and the Hulk ends up on a very arch sci-fi planet with gladiatorial battles, elemental demigods and a downtrodden insect slave-race. The old clock on the wall tells us that it is rock o' clock.

And rock it does. The Hulk, as Strongest One There Is, flourishes Conan-like and wades through seas of imperialists, monsters and robots, making alliances and enemies with gusto as he goes. It's a real shot in the arm, and a refreshing take on an old character. Also, given the length and breadth of the story, reading it in one volume has the feel of a big proper nerdy fantasy epic, with the wonderfully anarchic twist of having a disaffected Hulk shrugging off talk of foretold destinies and prodigal saviours in favour of More Smashing.

But it's a sensitively-handled Hulk, one compellingly faced for the first time with the idea of his wild, brutal strength being something admirable. So: if you want big nasty monsters, some of the best Hulk writing ever, a wonderful stinger for the soon-to-be-collected World War Hulk and some of the most gorgeous Ladronn covers you'll ever see, pick this one up. You won't be disappointed.

The Escapists
Dark Horse
Story: Brian K Vaughan
Art: Philip Bond, Steve Rolston, Jason Shawn Alexander, Eduardo Barreto

Once upon a time, I blogged about how impressive the Escapist continuity was, and how keen I was to check out the other elements to it, namely The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and this comic book sequel-of-sorts. Well, to shorthand it, the novel's wonderfully-written, lengthy and rewarding, and very much deserves your time, but the Pulitzer Prize probably clued you into that. However, The Escapists has not as yet won a Pulitzer Prize, so I'll tell you a little about it.

The story follows Max Roth, a weedy elevator repairman from Cleveland with ambitions of writerdom. His father dies when he's a child, and he inherits The Key To The Basement. When the young Roth first ventures down there, he's faced with something he never expected - boxes and boxes of comic book ephemera, all to do with Kavalier and Clay's Escapist character. His mother dies after he takes up his job as elevator repairman, and he inherits $150,000. He immediately spends it on the unwanted, long-outdated license for the Escapist and all spinoff characters created for the franchise. He finds an artist in a girl he rescues from a stuck elevator, and a letterer in the thoughtful jock he atypically befriended during high school. The Escapists chronicles their attempts to create in an industry that gives untested talent no footholds whatsoever, and it does it brilliantly.

Now, Steve Rolston is no slouch. He delivers great layouts and expression here and his action work for Queen and Country's early volumes is also sterling. But to have him take over after an introductory chapter by Philip Bond, whose art moves me on a profound level, is a bit of a tease. But there's a reason - this chapter appeared as a kind of pilot for the main series, in the pages of The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist comic, and the rest of the main series was all Rolston.

As I say, however, Rolston never drops the ball, and the talking-head stuff and visual gizmos are brilliantly realised. He's assisted by Jason Shawn Alexander, who ghost-draws for elevator-girl Case Weaver within the pages of the comic, and Eduardo Baretto, who mimicks the depression-era action comic style with line-perfect respect. It's a really convincing blend of styles, and works just as an experiment in having several totally-different artists work together on a single story.

The Escapists fills the reader with the heady ambition of youth, just as the early chapters of Kavalier and Clay managed to do, and it does so in its own idiomatic way. It's not just a retread, it's a whole new chapter to the saga, and a moving evocation of the new generation's attempts at stardom and creative respect. It does contain a few callbacks to the novel, however, including a character dressing as the Escapist himself to publicise his cause. There aren't the usual showdowns with stern corporate types, nor, in fact, many other characters at all bar the three protagonists. It's somewhat of a stripped-down story, but by design, and it pays off.

The Escapists doesn't, in synopsis, do anything that a prose novel couldn't, but it's the execution that shows comics' potential as a literary medium, with dream sequences, broken narratives and the aforementioned art style shifts that justify the characters' determination and the form of the story itself. In other words, it's in that rare category of 'good alternative comics' - it's a book that neither leans on nor shamefully rejects comics' legacy as a disposable art form. This is yet another triumph for Vaughan that singles him out as one of comics' greatest genre-hoppers and most capable talents, and acts as the new generation's equivalent of Will Eisner's classic The Dreamer for both inspiring and evoking the pure enthusiasm of artistic endeavour. Highly recommended.

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'Beat' Nick wonders what the hell Vaughan's doing writing Lost.

Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty (And Standards!)

I've always found bad demos slightly soul destroying. I mean, I've seen people say, "Don't judge the game by the demo." In fact, some demos even come with a little publisher warning at the start saying that what you play may not necessarily represent the finished product. To which the obvious response is, "Do you know what the word demo is derived from?"

Obviously, demos do represent the final product. Game companies do not send out little playable segments of their unreleased titles as a complete show of good will. They are marketing tools. As such, they can be decidedly counter-productive.

Some aren't. I bought the original Call of Duty based purely on the demo. On playing the original Call of Duty, I realised that I'd made a grave mistake. The best level - Burnsville, I believe, is utterly perfect - was the demo.

There were actually two whole levels of Deus Ex released. That's not a demo. That's getting a fifth of the game for free.

And so on and so forth. When a demo is good it can inspire you to buy something you'd never considered, swing a decision in the favour of something you've been considering or confirm your greatest optimisms about a game.

The Xbox 360 Turning Point: Fall of Liberty demo is one of those counter-productive ones.

The Turning Point demo is, I assume, the intro level. There is a preamble explaining how the following, a Nazi invasion of mainland USA, did not actually take place. This is Sliders territory, y'all. To be honest, unless your history is really patchy, this seems to serve no real point other than a pre-emptive destruction of any suspension of disbelief.

The caption for this on Gamespy, was Washington occupied by the Nazis is a "scary sight." Is it, really? Only on the same level as Washington occupied by aliens or Genghis Khan or a fucking Cyborg Ghandi is. You want a scary sight? Look up Auschwitz.

Then it starts. Luftwaffe jets strafing buildings. Huge zeppelins looming over New York harbour. The Statue of Liberty getting blitzed. You're some anonymous construction worker and your first job is to get down off your half-constructed building.

Fortunately, the Nazis are using Convenience Bombs, which remove all but one route off the metal struts.

Naturally, you pick up a gun and take the fight to the heavily armed Nazis who are all around. At this point, I'm still not sure if they're meant to be Fallschrimjager or just the pilots of downed jets who've brought assault rifles with them.

You shoot a few of them, clamber through the wreckage of a couple more buildings and then see some fellow New Yorkers (more on this later) who are going to organise a first line of defence. You jump in the back a flatbed lorry. As you're driving away, a skyscraper behind you collapses slowly in on itself and a huge cloud of dust smothers you. That's it.

Some of the interviews with the game designers say there's an undertone of 9/11. No shit.

As a demo, its overly short and devoid of excitement or tension to the extent its just boring to play. It fades in with you standing on a girder and the jets swooping in. No introduction. No attempt to set the scene or get you into character. That jars immediately. Surely the obvious way to go would be a Half Life style trip-to-work introduction? At least then there'd be some emotional attachment to the people who start falling to their death all around you and - if not that - at least some breathing space to settle into character?

If you're going to start with a jolt, though, it had better be a good one. And it should be, on paper. Sadly, the next thing that struck me was just how dull the invasion of New York was. I mean, this should have been the opening of Bioshock x1000. There should have been NOISE. Crowds of people in the streets, screaming, running away. Cars swerving wildly through the crowds to escape. Bombs raining down, devastation all around, a physics engine tearing buildings apart and throwing them down into the streets. It should have been the fucking apocalypse. Instead... its just lame.

The major problem is that New York doesn't feel like a city at all. Its more deserted than Rapture. Maybe its been evacuated and - if that is the reason its devoid of life - hopefully that will be explained in the full game. Indeed, like the snowstorm in Max Payne, its a good excuse for having a 20th Century city less busy than the first village in Assassin's Creed. However, taking the demo on face value, the only people you see are the six fellow workers who tumble to their doom, the people smothered in dust at the end and the Nazis.


Instead of an awe-inspiring depiction of complete chaos (Call of Duty 4's credit sequence, for example) that left me giddy and reeling, it was an utter bore.

"What do you do, Daddy?" "Why, I paint the massive Swastikas, Freidrich." "On what?" "On fucking everything. Now, eat your baby."

For starters, there's absolutely no threat to you as a character until you run into the Nazis on the ground. You quickly realise that the bombs and jets aren't allowed to hurt you and so you can happily saunter to the bottom. Once at the bottom, the whole construction site disappears in some badly animated fireballs (do metal girders really explode like that?).

There isn't a great deal more I can criticise. The combat in the demo is basically limited to three or four very scripted encounters. It seemed uninspiring simple and, like all the rest, slightly dull. I don't understand the decision to include an iron sight function in any game where you have a very visible cross hair and firing from the hip is perfectly accurate. Like a lot of console shooters, there was simply no tangible weight to the weapons.

This gun sounds like some very small clogs falling down some stairs.

My problems with it go deeper than that, though. I propose that ordinary, every day folks aren't soldiers for the simple reason that they don't want to be soldiers. If we all take this assumption to be true, then, faced with an invasion of such epic proportions, why wouldn't the main character's first instinct be to leg it? And hope, desperately, that a bomb didn't fall on his face as he did so.

So what if he is the eventual saviour of the world? So what if he's 1950s Nazis version of John Connor? He should be reluctant. He should try and escape the carnage (remember, in my alternate history version of this game, there is proper carnage). Then, he should be thrown into a situation where he has to take up arms or, indeed, witness something that fills him - and you, the player - with such incandescent rage that he wants to repel the invaders with every fibre of his being.

I'm thinking Uncle Owen's farm torched by the Nazis and a secret message from the resistance movement in his unwitting possession.

In game terms, the only titles that have genuinely inspired this sense of vigilante rage are few and far between. Max Payne, perhaps, on a primal level. A deeper, more intelligent example of how to do it is Half Life 2. Enforced player impotence, suddenly, blissfully, replaced by a crowbar. These gaunt, skull-headed fascists force you - Gordon Bloody Freeman - to pick up their litter. They stop you exploring the city. They hunt you, weaponless, across rooftops. Their drones keep taking bloody pictures. You round a corner - and there are two Civil Protection Bastards beating on some innocent civilians.

You approach, crowbar raised. You want to get medieval on someone.

"I write novels! In crayon!"

Thinking back, thinking about how that small slice of gaming impotence made me feel, it'll be quite fun taking a crowbar to the G-Man.

Anyway, the point is, Half Life 2 did this. It did taking down totalitarian regimes from inside and Turning Point should have bloody learnt something from that. Again, I worry about this. Perhaps, in the real game, there's more. There might be more before the cheap fade-in beginning. And there might be more than just picking up a gun and becoming The Punisher. But why release a demo of this particular level and leave all that out?

As it stands, there's no truth to the moment where the construction worker decides he can probably take these Nazis. Again, there's been no threat before this point. It feels natural to just slip away and get a fuck-load of counselling. Yet - after a few moments - it turns out that, yes, it was a good idea to pick up a gun because the Nazis - those damn, dastardly Nazis - are killing everything.

A few words about all that, actually: what a load of fucking rubbish.

I'm used to Nazis being reduced to B-Movie, cartoon villains. I don't think there's been a World War Two game that really addresses the idea that not everyone in the Third Reich ate babies and summoned demons. Perhaps, in the distant future, whatever empire follows the current American one will subject us all to thousands of games where every single American is a totally ruthless capitalist, murdering bastard, ironically harping on about the importance of personal liberty. Or was that Bioshock?

The fact remains that if this game was set in the 1960s and the Nazis had built a giant Swastika shaped laser on the moon which you - ordinary American astronaut - had to single-handedly destroy - it would be more plausible than this rubbish. It'd be more interesting too but only because the ramifications of a Nazi space race (which they'd win) are worth exploring.

Lets examine the alternate history for a moment.

Winston Churchill dies before World War Two. The Nazis invade Britain. This is because Winston Churchill invented the Spitfire and then went on to personally lead the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Without his record-breaking 302 (with a further 200 still under debate) kills, the British air force could not secure dominance over the English channel.

Its well known that in 1940, Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland. What's classified is that he took with him two regiments of elite SS cyborgs and Winston Churchill killed them all. With a sword.

"With Churchill dead, I have no imperial ambitions whatsoever!"

Also, you know that picture of Winston Churchill with a tommy gun? That was taken five minutes after he parachuted into Berlin, shot his way into Hitler's bunker, killed everyone, even the fucking dogs, and then made it all look like suicide.

The fact that Churchill was removed from this timeline by a taxi - would it be cool if it was the the taxi that you - the character in the game - drove? Or would that just be bollocks? You decide - means that Hitler has grown a massive brain.

Churchill did this, too.

He's no longer interested in expanding a Germanic empire into the east. He can predict that, by the eighties, the Soviets will be all used up. The real enemy are the yanks. So, he launches a full land invasion of the east coast of America.

Blitzkrieg is an amazing tactic. Its not only good for small countries directly connected to your own or - potentially - small islands separated by a channel that celebrities can quite easily swim. It works across massive expanses of water, too.

"Lebensraum? HA! Haha! HA. Ha. Haha. Ha!"

What Hitler has also learnt is that military targets are just distractions. What you need to do when you invade a country is simply send some low-flying zeppelins in and shoot the fucking shit out of builders. That's the first step when it comes to invading a country.

To be fair, I think Hitler's missed a trick here. Wouldn't it be better to drop troops straight into the south of America? They could establish a whole new Reich and no-one would even notice. ZING!

Hitler has also learnt (like all good aliens) that you can take over a country much easier if you destroy all their fucking monuments. In the same way that the invasion of France in our universe began with the shattering destruction of the Eiffel Tower, in the game, the Statue of Liberty gets blown the fuck up. Fall of Liberty, see? The liberty of the people in, say, little old England being completely irrelevant.

When the Statue gets done, Roosevelt (or whoever the fuck is meant to be in charge) is probably just waiting for a secretary to bring him the Unconditional Surrender form.

I'll tell you something else that happens. Anyone who has played Red Alert 2 frowns and says, quietly, "Hang on...?"

"I vonder vot happened to you in zis vacky timeline?"
"Que?"

Giant zeppelins and huge battleships outside New York? The Statue of the Liberty getting blown up? Ridiculous 60s technology? Mainland USA being invaded? I think its probably easier to list an alternate history where this hasn't happened! LOL!

All very familiar.

And that brings me to my last point.

Don't buy Turning Point: Liberty Falls. Its just so weary. Its like one of the old women I saw in the pub last night: so past it they can't remember what it was, still packing their frail, perma-tanned bodies into little black dresses so low cut the crinkled mess that constitutes their cleavage is basically flopped in their drink. They're used up. They're dried up. And their attempts to keep up with the younger versions of themselves, thronged all around and sneering, seems, at best, deranged and, at worst, like the death throes of a gangling, ugly bird.

Bare with me.

We've done this all before. Nazis/Soviets/Invading Aliens/Godzilla/King Kong, all treated in exactly the same way. Isn't being exactly the same, thematically, as a Nazi a bit insulting to a giant ape? This very year, World in Conflict on the PC, has had bombers over New York and tanks rolling through the American heartland.

They might tell you this isn't a World War Two game but it is. It just is. You're another American all-star, kicking Nazi butt. We've been doing this since Wolfenstein. We're experts at it. You've got to bother to make it good. Not just relabel a bunch of World War Two submachine guns and make all the Nazis wear Psychonaut goggles.

You, dear reader, do not need 9/11 with Swastikas. In fact, you might not necessarily find it that tasteful an idea. In fact, I find the whole idea that Nazi invasion is worse and more horrifying when it happens on American soil distasteful, actually. The fact they've literally had to make it worse - with big zeppelins and battleships the size of Wales - is just silly.


Silly, tired, boring and it looks horrendous. I know people like that and I avoid them like the plague. Take note.

------

Jachap thinks you should read Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle instead.

Gunmetal Fatigue

Over the last few months, Far Cry 2 has had its first snippets of information, screen shots and even a pretty solid-looking engine video released, but it seems not to have generated very much hype. Indeed, it took me a hefty amount of exposure in magazines, news sites and blog posts for me to even notice it at all. This is most likely the fault of Crysis. Big, shiny and explosive, it was developed by Crytek (the original Far Cry's development team), and seemed like a whole new beginning for the team after their departure from Ubisoft over to the industrial giant known as EA.

"Madden '08 paid for this magic robot suit, and dammit,
I'm going to use it!"

So after frankly ludicrously gorgeous footage and images surfaced, with its hyper-destructive environments and procedurally-generated volumetric clouds, Crysis seemed like the very epitome of next-gen. So when Ubisoft quietly announced that they were going to be making a Far Cry sequel in-house, the reaction was understandably muted. It all seemed pretty self-evident, really.

But as usually seems to happen, appearances were deceiving. Not many people actually bought Crysis, perhaps because it was PC-only, or perhaps because of its phenomenal system requirements. Those who did play it were entertained, but largely because they could throw trees into men's faces. Reviews and player feedback largely seemed to revolve around the fact that you were on the same damn pretty island fighting the same damn gung-ho mercenaries, only this time with a lego gun that you could make into other guns, and instead of boring genetic experiment monsters, you were fighting boring alien monsters after the game's halfway point.

Crysis came and went, and seemed to be technically impressive, but still not The Future. It was only after this point that I spotted a screenshot of Far Cry 2 in PC Gamer. It was an in-game shot of a man holding up both a compass and a map. Not a hyper-tech global-positioning map-PDA, no. A piece of raggedy yellow paper. The background was of an African desert, with some nice trees in it, some mountains in the distance and a shack somewhere in there. "Ooh," I thought. "That's cool." A map and a shack grabbed me much more than cybernetic muscles or a lego gun, just because they were different. Same old story - 'cool' beats 'technologically impressive' every time.

Further investigation led me to discover the aforementioned gameplay video from last year's E3, which contains both the map and some shacks:



Looks pretty standard for a shooter, right? Here's the house you can blow up, here's the flamethrower and - hey, hang on, you can set fire to the grass? Cool.

And it keeps dropping nice little touches like that on you. Foliage swaying and burning in the wake of explosions, and the fact that if you get shot, your hard-as-nails character has to yank the bullet out and heal himself or risk bleeding to death. These are what we really liked about Far Cry - an original setting (doing the same one again doesn't work), the spirit of the Indiana Jones adventurer, and the survivalist sensibilities of plotting assaults and lying prone in the long grass as your quarry meanders around aimlessly. Giant cyborg tree-flinging arms don't quite capture it.

But hey, that's a creative decision. I find this route more appealing, but that speaks more of my own personal tastes than of anything else. Also, yes, don't worry, I am getting to a point here.

As will this gentleman soon be! Ha ha ha!

Looking further into it, it becomes clear that this is a development team worth putting money into. They operate a development blog including occasional video entries, and unlike many dev journals, these are quite interesting, particularly as they talk about something other than bumpmapping. The Thursday December 13th entry in particular caught my eye. It talks about the reasons the team decided on the Savannah as a backdrop rather than, say, the Peruvian foothills or rural Japan. There's a real creative thought process going on here, one that inspires confidence.

But of course, the blog also covers a lot of graphical and technical points about the world within the game engine, and they really do impress. It links to this article which covers a lot of the elements that make the game so pretty, albeit in French, unfortunately for some. Despite the fact that the stuff demonstrated here and in the demo video above has been done before in other games, Ubi's team has combined them and put them in a setting where they can really shine. There are things like the super-fancy lighting engine, which seems somewhat like Satanic programming magic...

Hey, wow, the light from the sun reflects an orange glow
off the sand onto the bottom of the car, neat!

...and many more. All little technical trinkets that seem piddling and arbitrary until you put them together, turn into some kind of Neanderthal forehead-knuckler and just go

OH HOLY JESUS IT'S REAL THEY MADE A REAL
PLACE OUT OF COMPUTER MACHINES!

Far Cry 2's visual development, both in terms of the character of the landscape and the technical achievements of the graphics engine, has clearly had an admirable amount of time spent on it. So what am I getting at? An upcoming game made with a large amount of funding from a leading publisher, has very nice graphics. That's more-or-less it. But now we come somewhat closer to the aforementioned point.

LOL

Games like this and Assassin's Creed have done amazing things for creating places rather than just A Game Setting. Assassin's Creed went further by having a decent go at creating people to populate that place, people with moods and personalities, who reacted differently to different situations in a socially believable manner. The result, particularly in Creed's larger cities (Jerusalem in particular), was the sense of a truly living, breathing environment, packed with variety, in which you had VERY LITTLE IF ANYTHING TO DO. And THERE's the point.

Watch that Far Cry 2 demo again. Pretty, yes, cool, yes, but what does it hint at for the game? Largely that you go to a place with stuff in it and shoot some people. I'm a big old adventure-game-loving fag (to use the parlance of our times), so you'd expect this from me, but it really does begin to grate after you see free-roaming environments like this

and know that all you'll be doing in them is shooting some guys and taking some stuff off them, probably! They've fully realised a believable environment and have the technology to fill it with people, friendly or otherwise, but the actual meat of the gameplay seems to change only slightly from generation to generation.

Okay, yes, this is a little unfair on Far Cry 2. For one thing, nobody really knows how it's going to play yet, and for another, there have already been hints at deeper character interaction and mission structures, in the style of the well-intentioned Boiling Point. Like I say, it's a talented dev team and I'm certainly interested by what they've produced so far, but at the moment they're one in what seems like a million.

Assassin's Creed did its best through eavesdropping, pickpocketing, swordfighting and free-running to produce a streamlined and compelling vision of the 12th Century Holy Land. But despite its achievements in environment and AI, this seems much more like a real place:

Aaaaand yep, we're talking about Psychonauts again.

Whispering Rock Psychic Summer camp wasn't 50x50km and it wasn't a single streaming environment. It was broken up by loading screens and wasn't even that large as a hub, all told. But playing it, it felt massive. There was so much to do, so many people to talk to, and it changed so often, that it perfectly conveyed the impression of being alive. More than just a decent platform game in a pretty locale, it was a real experience to have in a real place, and it wins people over almost instantly for it.

While games become prettier and prettier places to be, if there's no reason for a person to invest in them, it's all in vain. This is the philosophy that I hope games like Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto 4 will benefit from, and give us more reasons to return to our games.

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'Beat' Nick does sometimes feel like he's repeating himself, yes.

Plucky British Winner

War is a nasty business. Fraught with peril, death at every turn and, if Company of Heroes is to be believed, a fuckload of swearing. A few choice quotes from the British 2nd Army who, unlike a lot of strategy game units, don't simply reply "Sir?" "Affirmative" when clicked upon:

An infantry NCO to his squad: "Move it you fucking tossers!"

A tank commander to his crew: "Shut the fuck up! We're gettin' oooooordddurs."

A random infantryman, when gunning down the boche: "This is for my brother!"
Not as sweary, perhaps, but the little guy has a back story, for God's sake. What strategy games ladle that much character on the little toy soldiers you command?

Its brilliant stuff and enhances the immersion no end. Its also refreshing for the British in the Second World War to be portrayed as proper hard bastards, as opposed to a bunch of upper class tossers who bow down to Monty and, when a tiger tank is hidden in a hay bail not four hundred yards away, sniff, look down their long aristocratic noses and reply:

"Ai've bin told to avoid causing damage to civilian property! If I can't see the buggah, I can't blooday shoot him, carn I?"

This:

"********** ****** you *******!!!"

Not this:

"Mmmmmeeeuuurrrggghh."

But it was only today when the absolute genius of imbuing each of the tiny men with so much character was made absolutely clear to me.

Thus:

The Story of Jeffery, The Best Commando Who Ever Lived

Skirmish is really where Company of Heroes excels. Certainly, with the addition of two wholly distinct sides (the new Panzer Elite and the Brits) I can see endless longevity in the online multiplayer. That's if I ever actually get into a game.

In many ways, I think the reason I had so many problems was simply due to my computer forming some bizarre resistance movement against Relic's matchmaking system. I was continually "unable to connect to all players." After about fifteen minutes endlessly clicking join, a process complicated by my web connection dropping out multiple times and the in-built necessity, every time it did, to sign back into my relic account, I finally joined a game and, after about three minutes of real play, the entire enemy team dropped out.

I think they were just scared.

Its strange because I hadn't seen Relic's matchmaking system mentioned in any capacity, positive or negative, in a single one of the reviews I'd read. It was pretty shocking to see how horrendously clunky it was. After the on-line experience of World in Conflict (hich is streamlined to perfection where this is concerned) Opposing Fronts felt like falling back into Medieval times with Billy Connolly.

All that being said, I still find the single player experience of CoH very diverting. The sheer attention to detail is breathtaking. For example, in the third Allied mission, you are allotted a task force of Royal Commandos - those of the Red Devil bravado and maroon caps - to attack a German airfield outside of Caen.

Its a night mission and operates on the basis of CoH's rather skewed version of stealth which is basically as full of explosions as the usual levels only without some of the bigger tanks and base construction. Its a lovely homage to Command and Conquer's rock hard non-production missions.

The Night

When you land, all your troops have slightly different vocal responses and they whisper. That's pretty class. Then, a little later, the mission switches (as such missions are wont to do) to the usual combined arms assault sort of stuff. Your support arrives in the form of a Canadian regiment.

"Its quiet. Almost... too quiet." "Why do you have to say that every single night, Kleiner?"

In a lesser game, the Canadians would be no different to your usual units. Maybe they'd be a different colour and when you clicked on them, the little unit display at the bottom would say CANADIAN. That's the sort of thing I've become unconsciously used to in games.

COH is different. Despite the fact the units are basically the same, they are all Canadian. Their vocal "affirmatives" and "WE'RE GOING TO FUCKING DIE!" are all in a warbling Canadian lilt. There's even a French Canadian who gets some cracking lines.

Its sort of breathtaking that they went to all that effort for one single level, when the majority of World War II games are happy to have Americans versus Nazis and leave it at that. I can imagine lots of Canadians, sitting down to play the game, being very pleasantly surprised that their involvement (and that of the Commonwealth) has actually been acknowledged for once.

But the best occurrence in that level was a little later.

I was busy securing the foothold I'd created when a secondary objective popped up. "Destroy the fuel barrels" it said. I noted where they were positioned on the minimap and thought, "Sure, I'll do those when I come to them."

The thing was, scrolling across the battlefield, I came across a Helpful Little Hint saying "Land a Glider Here," on a patch of rutted earth behind the fuel barrels. I had the Manpower (COH's currency of choice) to spare and so launched a glider.

It came grinding in behind the objective, the nose opened and out charged my Commandos in their wonderfully, deliriously Boys Own sort of way. I charged the fuel compound, but made a mistake.

Not Jeffery, but its nice to pretend.

In my rush to take the fight to the dirty huns, I had neglected an unguarded side entrance into the compound. My assault team went for the main gates, where the concentration of enemy patrols were lying in wait.

As soon as the bullets started flying (cue: "I'M FUCKING HIT!" "THE TOSSERS ARE ALL OVER US!") I aborted Plan A and rerouted my men to the side entrance. I got them in the compound but troops from all over were converging on them.

The thing with Commandos is, they're better than the Wehrmacht's standard soldiers at the best of the times and COH is a very generous game. As this was designed as a non-production sort of level, the enemy were really just the fabled "old men and boys" World War Two pre-mission Intel always optimistically states it will be. They were the most standard of the Axis forces avaliable with barely more than bolt action rifles, so I only a couple of men in the suicidal charge on the main gates and the quick about turn round the back.

On top of that, COH had also provided some pick-up-able weaponry within the compound. In the game, you will occasionally wipe out a LMG squad, a HMG unit or some infantry with a bazooka. When you do so, this is dropped on the ground and you can pick it up and use it yourself. Each of your squads are limited to just one of these bonus pick-ups but they're worth having, as they really do increase the fire power available to you. Indeed, its basically essential for a few of your infantry units to grab some anti-tank hardware. A brace of panzershreks can be the difference between a failed offensive and Victoria Cross-winning glory.

This is exactly what it was like. Only it didn't look half as good on my PC.

This being the case, I got my Commandos to grab a discarded German LMG. Then they got stuck in. Basically, it wasn't looking great. They were pinned down in medium cover by a group of German infantry to the north and another squad that had rushed in from the east.

Fortunately, Royal Commandos (uniquely among the British) are equipped with frag grenades. I used these desperately, thinning the numbers of the enemy thronged about me.

It still wasn't looking good. My men were being killed too. COH is odd like this at times. Due to the way the firefights function, there can be a period where the two opposing sides line up and shoot at one another, bullets going everywhere, no-one getting hit, no-one even being suppressed then, all of a sudden, a flurry of deaths on both sides.

Indeed, this is exactly what happened. Suddenly, I was reduced to one man, one maroon beret-ed glider hero. His comrades cut down in a mist of red around him, he cowered behind a metal support strut.

Another quirk of COH's gameplay is that, if a unit does pick up a fallen weapon, invariably (be it a bug, a facet of the game's code, a health bonus - whatever) it is the man who is clutching the scrounged gun who is left alive.

Again, this was the case. Jeffery, my one brave soul, his unit butchered, still had the LMG and, with it, a palpable chance.

Also, he had a grenade. I liked to think that it was either his very last one, thrown to him by his dying sergeant in a last, Herculean effort or his "lucky grenade" his mates had always ribbed him for carrying, which had remained in his belt throughout Italy and North Africa. Seeing his death was just around the corner, he hurled it.

It landed among the Germans to the north, exploded, killed four. The fifth scarpered.

This only left the two Germans to the east. Jeffery promptly stepped out from cover, the debris from the grenade blast still raining down all about, and pumped a burst into one of the Germans. The other ducked out of sight.

I took my chances and instructed Jeffery to plant his demo charge. There were more Germans closing in on him, time was of the essence.

He went to work. The little progress bar blinked into existence.

The German to the east raised his rifle. This is it, I thought. Sorry Jeffery.

The German fired. He missed. The bullet must have nicked Jeffery's ear but it missed.

The progress bar increased. The other Nazis closed in. The single East German, Jeffery's nemesis, worked the bolt of his rifle - click, click - raised it. His second shot went wide.

Like I said, old men and boys. Rubbish.

Jeffery finished wiring in the demo. He turned, picked up his LMG and opened up. The East German was tumbled by the bullets.

The thing was, I couldn't risk getting Jeffery clear of the blast. I had to blow the fuel tanks now, to earn the secondary objective medal. Yes. That's right. I was the worst O/C ever, sacrificing my men for glory.

Once explosives are planted in COH, its up to your discretion when you push the plunger. A lovely little "Detonate!" icon appears.

Sorry, Jeffery. I clicked it. The explosions filled the screen. A clutch of Jerries, racing to the compound, were blown apart. The East German who Jeffery had so calmly put down was liquidised where he lay.

The fireball dissipated. The smoke cleared, revealing fire streaked, twisted wreckage.

And, standing in the centre of it all, my maroon beret hero. Jeffery, still swinging his LMG, surrounded by destruction.

My medal award notification appeared. I didn't care. I owed it to Jeffery to get him out alive. Double quick, I sent him legging it from the smouldering compound, resolving that I would keep him off the line till the end of the mission and keep the poor blighter alive.

But this was not to be.

A bit of COH scripting kicked in and Jeffery went to ground in a collection of buildings just south of the compound. He was behind enemy lines, as airborne troops are supposed to be and so was hiding until morning until the other elements of the assault force rescued him.

Not long after, I completed the mission. Fade out.

The Morning

Fade in. The next mission.

Its weird. I've got these screenshots from all sorts of places - and they're literally all of the mission I'm describing.

I have to admit, about twenty minutes in to the next part of the level - to well and truly destroy the airfield with a proper full sized, combined arms force - I'd sort of forgotten about Jeffery. Indeed, that first half of the mission involves setting up a defensive line and repulsing wave after wave of German counter-attack, so I was somewhat distracted.

Then, with the Germans repulsed, it came to the final push.

And another secondary objective appeared. "Save the Commandos." At the side of the map, suddenly stripped of fog of war, I saw a single building, surrounded by Germans. On the roof, entirely uncontrollable, still firing his LMG: Jeffery, the last of his unit. His health was dwindling.

Some Canadians on their way to save Jeffery.

I diverted my entire force. Hordes of infantry, commando and Canadian and tanks of every size flowed across the map like some river of divine retribution. They cut through the Germans assailing Jeffery with appalling ease.

Jeffery came sprinting from the building and was returned to my direct control. I sent him to the very rear of the map, well out of harm's way.

I like to imagine that Jeffery was returned to Blighty, a hero, that he survived the war and went to have great success in civilian life. I like to think he wasn't too traumatised by the slaughter of his unit due to my hapless tactics and wasn't too haunted by all the Germans he killed and was able to marry, settle down with a decent job and sire a great brigade of children.

It made me wish that COH had a more advanced, more intricate veteran system, with stats at the end that (in a Worms sort of way) commented on the performance of the men at my command, where individuals in squads could be promoted to squad leader and where, after every level, there was a list of medal citations for remarkable acts.

Still, no matter. Perhaps it doesn't all need validation by the game. Perhaps, just as a story, a myth of one man, upon whom the tide of war did not weigh but who, regardless, did his damned finest, is enough.

To Jeffery. A true Brit.