Muzzled!, the third episode in Telltale Games’ Wallace & Gromit adventure series, is a rather pleasant surprise. Although nothing has changed from a fundamental gameplay perspective – this is still a fairly standard mix of examining objects, talking to people, and using items in the right places – it’s a tighter, smarter package than its predecessors.

Thus far, the XBLA ports of the Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures series have awkwardly tossed and turned between good and bad, like a feverish man having a horrible, yet erotic, nightmare, potentially leaving players unable to decide whether to continue on with the series or leave it behind. Muzzled! makes the decision of whether to play it or not somewhat easier, simply by being the best entry in the series thus far.

Plot wise, this episode focuses on the nefarious Monty Muzzle, a seemingly kind-hearted chap concerned with the town’s current lack of a dog shelter who, naturally, harbours ulterior motives. The game is set largely at the carnival he holds to “raise funds” for the shelter’s construction, but once Gromit gets wind of his true intentions, it’s up to the player to solve the episode’s puzzles and stop Monty from absconding with the town’s money.

It’s quite close to the sort of fare you’d typically expect from the pair’s claymation adventures, albeit nowhere near as dark, nor clever. Although there are some references to the earlier episodes, it is not a necessity to have played them beforehand.

There isn’t a lot to do in Muzzled!, as is so often the case with episodic releases (outside the Half-Life series), but this time around the puzzles are much more fun to solve. The script is funnier than it was in The Last Resort, and Gromit, who you play as for the majority of the episode, is far more expressive than before.

The use of Wallace’s new invention, the Infiniflavour ice-cream truck, is also quite inspired – any food object you place inside produces a new flavour of ice-cream, and even though there are only 6 different varieties to produce, it’s a fun idea that works well with the puzzles.

The puzzles themselves are still quite easy, but not ridiculously so, as they were in The Last Resort. And again, the series has crafted its puzzles without turning to illogical combinations or actions, which is rare for the genre. You can figure out everything through general sleuthing, and the ways you arrive at some of your solutions are quite excellent.

There seems to be more inventory this time around, as well as more things to interact with, meaning that problems can’t be solved simply by trying every object in your pocket against everything in the game world.  Although a few of the puzzle solutions are  immediately obvious, the game is, on occasion, able to stump you for enough time to let you give your brain a workout without necessarily getting frustrated.

Some of the complaints that can be attributed to the other episodes on XBLA can also be attributed to this one. The controls aren’t great, the game often gets confused over which direction you’re trying to move in, and there’s a pause of a few seconds every time a cut-scene is about to kick in.

800 MS Points still seems a little much for a game this short, especially when the game was recently a free download for PC users. Whilst Monty Muzzle himself is a great addition, the characters introduced throughout the series don’t have anywhere near as much charm as the canine and owner themselves. A case in point is Mr. Paneer announcing work during a pie-eating contest in the third act, which drove me to the brink of despair with its incessant repetitiveness. The stray dogs are, however, quite adorable.

After coming away from The Last Resort with the opinion that it was one to avoid, it’s great to be able to say that Muzzled! is much easier to recommend for any console-playing adventure gamers out there. It’s far from the best example of the genre on XBLA (you should grab The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition, and the Sam & Max series before this), but it’s a fun romp that won’t put any serious strain on the ol’ noodle, and the best episode of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures thus far.

After an irritatingly long wait, the remainder of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures have finally been released on XBLA, coinciding rather awkwardly with a limited time price drop on the PC version, which is a celebration of the pair’s 20th anniversary.

For the purpose of this review, let’s assume your PC isn’t up to scratch, or you simply don’t want to play the games on the PC for whatever reason (otherwise, check out Paul Clark’s review of the PC version.) The XBLA release is exactly the same as the PC release, but with achievements, the obligatory (albeit pointless in this case) leader boards, a new control scheme (since console controllers don’t typically favour the ol’ point and click) and a few extra faults.

The plot of this second entry into this adventure series starts off on a suitably charming note, with Wallace deciding to battle a holiday-canceling bout of rain by building a summer beach retreat in his own basement. It’s a fun throw-back to the simple plot of the first movie, A Grand Day Out, although they miss out on a lot of obvious jokes about the weather in the UK. The various characters introduced in the game series thus far are invited to visit his resort, and after ensuring everyone’s happiness, the plot segues rather inelegantly into a quasi-murder mystery, sans both murder and mystery. It’s an odd one for sure.

For the player, this episode amounts to spending an incredibly short amount of time solving some rather rudimentary puzzles. The good news is that the puzzles are incredibly logical, never requiring you to glue a piece of ham to a vase to appease a yeti or anything ridiculous like that, neatly by-passing one of the adventure genre’s typical pitfalls. The control scheme is also a neat fit for the control pad, even if there are occasional issues with the game seemingly getting confused over where exactly you are trying to walk.

The game looks the part too, with the smudginess of the faux-clay characters being a particularly nice touch. The vast majority of characters and settings are, however, re-used from the first episode, giving this release a somewhat claustrophobic feel for anyone who played through Fright of the Bumblebees. The entire last three chapters are confined more or less entirely to Wallace’s house as well (you spend literally about two minutes outside during the third chapter). It lacks the sense of scale that the best adventure games tend to present.

The game stumbles quite severely in two key areas. The game is short. Episodic gaming is meant to provide short, sharp bursts of gaming, but for 800 MS Points, an hour and a half of gameplay would only really be acceptable if it was truly exceptional, or worth multiple play-throughs. Which leads to the second issue – the game is almost ridiculously easy.

The best adventure gaming is  about using your noggin, sleuthing your way to the right character /object interactions, and occasionally, slapping yourself on the forehead when you cave and check a FAQ, realising that the game’s ingenious solution alluded you because you didn’t think hard enough. The Last Resort never really gives you that chance to pat yourself on the back. Problems have a habit of solving themselves if you simply talk to everyone. There’s maybe one particularly clever puzzle in the game, and even that one can be solved fairly fast through simple trial and error if need be.

The plot and dialogue, the other major pull for the genre, fare a bit better, but lack the wit and ingenuity that fans expect from Wallace & Gromit. A few comic inventions aside, The Last Resort is largely devoid of the elements that make Wallace & Gromit so likable. Creator Nick Park discovered early on in A Grand Day Out that a lot could be said purely through Gromit’s eyebrow ridge. Aside from the odd eye-roll, Gromit is terribly underused. The dialogue jumps back and forth between great and pedestrian, with none of the secondary characters really measuring up in terms of charm.

The Last Resort is a misstep in a promising episodic series. Regardless of the quality of the other Grand Adventures releases, this second episode is difficult to recommend to even the most hardcore of Wallace & Gromit fans.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a game about the American Dream. While Niko’s story took him from rags to unfulfilled riches and The Lost and Damned‘s Johnny bore the ruination of his violent brotherhood and lifestyle, The Ballad of Gay Tony explores financial collapse, but does so with a smile and a wink. It’s a game of glorious, ridiculous excessiveness, presented through a series of antidotes against the recession’s effects on the underbelly of Liberty City’s glitz and glamour.

Even when things seem to be collapsing all around you, the clubs are perfect, the drinks are free, the women are all desperate to drag you into the nearest bathroom and the shotguns can take down a friggin’ helicopter in three shots. And it’s fun. Absurdly, gloriously fun.

The game casts you in the role of Luis Lopez, assistant, gunman  and bodyguard for the drug-addled, money-strapped nightclub owner Gay Tony. Profits are way down, Tony’s pill and cocaine usage is way up, and there’s heat coming down on you from all sorts of different angles. Without going into too many details, it wraps up a few loose ends from Niko’s plot – including what exactly happened to Bulgarian – and acts as a neat bookend for the Grand Theft Auto IV saga.

The Ballad of Gay Tony presents you with a dizzying array of delights. It’s far more expansive and ambitious than the already brilliant The Lost and Damned was (except in multiplayer – more on that later). While the gameplay is, by and large, similar to what was featured in the original game, there’s more variety in the game’s 26 missions than before, as the distinct personalities of your various ‘bosses’ and friends who issue the missions dictate what sort of mischief you get up to. If it’s Mori (Brucie’s Oompa-Loompaesque older brother), expect to drive fast cars dangerously. If it’s Yusif Amir (a rich, slightly mental investor with daddy issues), you’re going to be blowing stuff up and stealing special vehicles. There isn’t a single dud mission in the bunch, despite the occasional frustrating section.

Considering the game’s price (1600 MS Points, equating to $19.99US, $26.40AU or £13.60), the amount of new content is ludicrously generous. Aside from the missions themselves, the game offers up a bunch of new weapons, cars, TV shows, websites and songs, new indoor environments, ‘triathlon’ events, new ‘random encounters’, parachutes and a few subtle changes to Liberty City itself. Be sure to check out ‘Princess Robot Bubblegum’ on the in-game TV, which is, by a wide margin, the funniest parody Rockstar North have pulled off yet.

The new toys are the heart and soul of Gay Tony. The increasing extravagance of the weapons and activities the game indulges you in are in direct contrast to the game’s motif of financial hardship and falling on hard times. Perhaps Rockstar are making a statement on how games can mix strong narratives with giddy, sugar-rush escapism. However you read into it, having a shotgun that fires explosive bullets is awesome. As are attack helicopters, crowd-control tanks and races that start with you diving out of a helicopter, move on to speedboats and end with top of the line sports cars.

The firefights often feel different in Gay Tony, putting an emphasis on acting fast, letting off a lot of bullets and taking down multiple targets before they can get a good shot off,  rather than always relying on cover or blind-fire. This occasional change of pace is incredibly welcome, and allows for some very guilty pleasures as you, say, mow through a room of Russian gangsters with a huge machine gun, or take out pursuing cops with sticky bombs. Missions have checkpoints, as they did in The Lost and Damned, and can now also be replayed for high-score, if you so desire. Getting a 100% score on every mission is going to be an almost impossible badge of honour to earn for the truly dedicated.

The storyline and cast are both excellent. The game manages a great sense of personality, while at the same time cutting down greatly on time spent simply ‘hanging out’ with characters to flesh out their motivations. While ultimately the secondary characters aren’t as well realised as some of Niko’s friends, but  we shouldn’t really expect that from an expansion. The aforementioned Yusif Amir, in particular, is amazing (although I won’t spoil anything here), while Luis himself is fairly intruiging, despite being a delusional arsehole. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is Gay Tony himself, the self-proclaimed ‘old queen’ whose sexuality is expressed in a way that is essential to his character, yet in no way overdone or stereotypical, as it was with Florian Kravich in Niko’s story.

It should be noted that you spend a lot of time in Gay Tony piloting helicopters, and in two missions need to attack moving targets with your helicopter’s rockets/minigun. Personally, I found both instances hugely enjoyable, having spent ridiculous amounts of time playing The Lost and Damned‘s Chopper vs. Chopper mode. For some, though, these missions will prove frustrating, as I learned whilst consoling a slightly drunken friend online as he failed the same section over and over again. There’s a certain expectation that you haven’t forgotten how to play, and some players may need to spend time between missions re-learning a few old tricks.

There are a few minor issues to discuss. The combat controls have had issues since the original’s release, and they haven’t been resolved here. Sometimes Luis will stick to the wrong cover, you’ll get shot up simply because you can’t tell where bullets are hitting you from. It would have been nice to see a few things tightened up here and there. It also would have been helpful to have included a few more icons on the map – not having all the health-replenishing eateries isn’t too big a sin, but only one nightclub of the three featured is easy to find, which is a shame considering how big a role they play.

The multiplayer is also a fairly limited offering compared to what the previous two chapters offered. The more ‘standard’ modes are available with a few tweaks, the most noticeable of which is that freeplay now has parachuting. The ‘vanilla’ playlist of deathmatch/racing/etc. is probably at its best in Gay Tony, but the best multiplayer modes in the previous chapters were objective-based (bar the aforementioned Chopper vs. Chopper), and it’s a shame to not have any new co-op missions. Still, it seems unfair to criticize a game for something it was under no obligation to deliver, and regardless of whether you’re accessing the expansion through XBox Live or on a disc with The Lost and Damned, you’ll have access to plenty of other multiplayer content. Oh, and the golf mini game isn’t much fun, yet against all odds the dancing mini game is great, so it sort of evens out.

All too often, developers take the greedy route with downloadable content. Simple costume packs are released and priced in lieu of proper content, extra levels last for less than half an hour, simple multiplayer modes are sold at prices so high that the people who do buy them find no one else to play against, and content that should have been on the disc is released with an additional fee attached.

With The Lost and Damned, Rockstar showed that this doesn’t always have to be the way, and with The Ballad of Gay Tony, they have proven themselves as developers committed to quality. This pack could have featured a fifth of the content it features, and still have sold on name alone. But instead, they have gone the extra mile, providing us with the absolute best expansion available on XBox Live, and for that, they should be applauded.

[This is the second part of a 3-part series that takes a deep and personal look back at GTA4. You can read the 1st part, "My City Screams" here.]

There were rumors that CJ’s house in GTA: San Andreas was haunted by the ghost of his mother. It’s easy enough to see where this idea came from: CJ is, in a way, haunted by his family. He returns home out of family loyalty, the death of his mother and the state of affairs back home keep him tied to his old neighborhood. Ultimately, it was handled a little inelegantly (and no, there was no ghost), but it was there regardless.

Niko, too, is unquestionably haunted. His interactions with his ‘friends’ – the ones everybody complained about, because they kept calling and asking to go out and get drunk or fly around in a helicopter – allow Niko’s ghosts to come to the fore. The player may have long grown sick of bowling dates and the stupidly easy darts mini-game, but for Niko, his friends – especially Packie and Dwayne – are the only way he can get his problems off his chest without resorting to murder.

When the writers behind The Simpsons decided to make Seymour Skinner a Vietnam vet, they did so because they believed, quite rightly, that the notion of a cartoon character being in the Vietnam War was funny. Cartoons and games have taken a similar journey to public acceptance. It’s only quite recently that the idea of gaming and cartoons being for kids has been well and truly dispelled within society (if not all areas of society, than certainly enough for it to mean something).

It’s interesting to think that game narrative has reached a point where we can be completely convinced that the guy we’re controlling has fought through an unseen war – one we ourselves have no desire to revisit.

As gamers, we’re used to blasting our way through battlefields, blowing away Nazis, Vietcong and Alternate-History Freedom Hatin’ Commies left right and center. Yet the absent war of GTA IV is perhaps the most effectively brutal and horrifying war story a game has ever told.

Granted, Call of Duty 4′s portrayal of the effects of war is worthy of its own multiple-part article (and massive kudos in advance to Infinity Ward if Soap displays a logical reaction to what he witnessed throughout the first game in the sequel), but we don’t get to see these men back home. Niko’s time in the Yugoslav War has left a stain.

The American Dream, to him, is a new suit. But, of course, the stain runs too deep for Niko to ever truly be rid of. His recollections of his own actions, what he saw and what he had to do, are chilling and horrific.

Niko’s friendly excursions are, by and large, vehicles for story-telling and characterisation rather than enjoyable moments in and of themselves. During these moments, the game essentially transforms into an interactive narrative.

Certainly, it’s annoying having to endure a largely silent drive back to your friend’s house afterwards (unless you hail a cab, of course), but to turn your phone off, or forgo the achievement for raising your ‘like’ ratings above 90%, means missing out on some great insight into why Niko cannot seem to stop killing.

My argument here, essentially, is that the simple act of ‘being’ Niko in the game is fascinating. Whilst some players felt sympathetic to Niko’s desire to do good in America and avoided unnecessary kills, I couldn’t help but let Niko’s dark, efficient murderer side get the better of me at times.

For all its faults (incredibly generous lock-on and occasional sluggishness) the combat in GTA IV benefits greatly from the character. I found myself parking a block away and jogging to fight scenes so I could scope out the best cover and maybe snipe a few guys. It’s a fairly normal way to act in a game like this, yet somehow it feels more right here – it feels appropriate to Niko’s character. Niko is easier to get inside than your usual guy with a gun. Although his kill count means that he’s a character who could only ever exist inside a videogame, he still, somehow, feels real.

With all this talk of characterisation and crafting the city’s vibe, I should probably stop and discuss the fact that I do, in fact, think the game is ridiculously fun as well as incredibly interesting. Part of it is, of course, feeling a connection with Niko, though another part is the way a windshield crumples and blood sprays on it when you shoot the driver of that Turismo you want.

Then there’s the moment where I abandoned a flaming semi-trailer in a petrol station, leapt out and ran outside the 4-star wanted range on foot as the station exploded behind me. Or when I dodged a car in multiplayer by jumping and grabbing a ledge above me, as the car smashed into the wall that was now beneath my feet. Or when some friends and I jumped online and set up a pair of helicopters hovering just beyond a jump and took turns hurling cars over them. Hell, even the ‘Qub3d’ arcade machines were pretty fun.

I wonder, too, if people are as enthralled by the in-game internet as I am. Not simply because of the plot depth your e-mails add or because looking up ‘Little Lacy Surprise’ gives you a four-star wanted rating – Rockstar clearly worked  hard on the in-game ‘net, and the results are absolutely hilarious. There isn’t a single page there that isn’t well thought-out, intricately written and edited.

The parodies of the blogosphere and online dating scene are particularly spot-on. I hate to think that some players may have simply used it for the relevant missions and then ignored it – although the game makes no effect to prompt or force you into looking through it, the in-game internet is worth your time.

And then, of course, there’s the in-game television and radio programs. Although not quite as impressive as the internet, it’s worth turning the game on and flicking through the channels, or parking somewhere and listening in to an episode of Judge Grady on the radio.

And yet, it would be wrong of me to ignore that game’s various gameplay flaws. The actual missions, I admit, may not be quite as exciting to those who do not share my investment in Niko. Most frustrating, to me, is that something goes amiss on every single mission – you know that something bad is going to happen well before Niko does, simply because that’s how the game works.

I would have liked to see the occassional mission that went smoothly, with no killing, just to shake things up a bit (San Andreas did this for one or two missions, to great effect). It would have given the moments where everything falls apart a bit more punch. Perhaps worst of all, if you managed to get ahead of the game and fire off a shot on someone before the game wanted you to, the shot would have no effect on them, making you all too aware of the mission’s restrictions.

And, yes, the game should have had mid-mission checkpoints. There were only a few  toward the end that I ended up needing to play through multiple times, but it was still irritating, and their inclusion in The Lost and Damned was wholeheartedly welcome.

Regardless of their flaws, I would still argue that the missions were, generally speaking, very well structured. The game often manages to define linear paths through an open world without ever expressly hemming you into them. In the now famous ‘Four Leaf Clover’ mission, your escape through the streets feels very logical, as though nobody in their right mind would try any other options.

You take the linear path because it makes sense, not because the game sets up invisible walls. The car chases are immensly exciting, too. Firing whilst driving is much easier than in previous iterations, and lining up the perfect drive-by is immensely satisfying.

So on a basic level, ignoring my ranting about what some would no-doubt label ‘narrative wank’, I still find the game immensely satisfying. But it is the characterisation of Niko, the beating heart of Liberty City and the game’s complete dedication towards evoking the player to consider the nature of their actions that, in my mind, elevates the game into the greatest of our console generation so far.

‘In Defence of GTA IV’ will conclude next week with the 3rd and final part.

Grand Theft Auto IV’s PS3 and Xbox 360 releases are, according to Gamerankings, the first and third best reviewed games of this console generation (with Super Mario Galaxy snuggled between their awkward percentage divide). The series has consistently rated well since the release of GTA III, which  is often cited as one of the most successful transitions into 3-D any game franchise has ever made. GTA IV’s leap wasn’t as significant, but it was, the reviews argued, just as impressive.

And yet, as time went on, dissent towards the game started to pop up on blogs, forums and player reviews. At first, complaints at the in-game phone, the lack of sky-diving and other such distractions introduced in previous entries to the series and cries of ‘this is boring!’ seemed to be made in defiance, as though some players simply wanted to rebel against the magnitude of the review scores. As always, accusations were made that reviewers were being paid off, and the anti-GTA IV sentiments spread.

By the time the PC release came about, even some reviewers were changing their minds, stating that Saints Row 2′s recent release had ‘reminded them what fun was’. The end of the year rolled by, and GTA IV, despite being easily the best reviewed game of the year, lost out to the likes of Fallout 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4 in a lot of the gaming media’s ‘Best of the Year’ awards.

On a personal level, I find the accusations of GTA IV being ‘boring’ rather disheartening. Certainly, there are problems with it, even reasons to perhaps dislike it, which I will try to extrapolate on throughout these posts, but how can a game that worked so hard to really do something interesting with the medium be called ‘boring’? For all its exaggerated characters, occasionally clumsy combat and bowling bromance dates, I honestly don’t think any game has ever gotten me quite as emotionally involved in its world as GTA IV did.

GTA IV is filled with minor, yet hugely significant moments. It draws you into its world, makes you a citizen of Liberty City, chasing after your own piece of the American Dream. And then, slowly but surely, it lets you know that the dream isn’t there to be taken, simply by thrusting a gun into your hand and asking you to use it. Forget about the cliched ‘let him live or let him die’ moments – the game really stands out when it either doesn’t give you a say in the matter, or when it doesn’t advertise the choices you can make.

Case in point – in an early mission, the game tutors you on targeting specific body parts while hassling some guys to pay up to one of your bosses (honestly, I don’t remember which one – Vlad, probably). The game instructs you deliver a non-lethal shot to one guy. As Niko, I did this with no real remorse – it’s only a game, after all, so I did what I was supposed to do. What happened next has very much stuck with me. The guy next to him, his hands in the air, cried at me to please let them live. For reasons I’ve struggled to come to terms with ever since I first played this scene, turned to him and shot him dead.

‘Guilt’ is a rare emotion to provoke in an offline gaming experience, and yet, I was racked with it. Why, exactly? I can’t feel bad about killing a man who doesn’t exist – about, essentially, engaging in an activity that is so important to the game’s experience. But perhaps the guilt has lingered as it was the first time I really let Niko start to slip. Sure, I’d no doubt run over some pedestrians, and I’d killed a lot of guys in shoot-outs already, but this moment was so immediate and visceral.

It was a choice I, and Niko, had consciously made, and it wasn’t to make the game more fun, it wasn’t to help complete the mission. There was really no excuse for it beyond simply thinking it was appropriate, at that moment, for Niko to kill that man. Somehow, it made sense that someone could die in this way in Liberty City, and being a part of that problem made my stomach lurch.

GTA IV is filled with similar moments, but with the choice taken away from you. At several points, the game forces you to kill unarmed men in cold blood. Men who have done bad things, by and large, men who will not be missed – but still, these moments are hugely confrontational, dragging you ever deeper down a hole that Niko will not be able to climb out of.

At one point, my nerve gave out completely, and I tried to let a man I was meant to execute escape. The game made it clear that I would fail if he escaped, so I ended up chasing him along a cliffside path, eventually shooting him from a distance. It was easier that way than looking him in the eye would have been.

While about five examples of this come to mind immediately, there are two real standouts. One is from an optional ‘Most Wanted’ mission that sees you going after a drug dealer in a grungy apartment block, long since handed over to the city’s serious drug addicts It’s a place you come back to in The Lost and Damned to collect Johnny’s girlfriend, if that helps.

Walking down the various corridors to the target, junkies stumble around, largely oblivious to your presence, graffiti is sprawled across the walls, and there’s no sense of personal space or privacy. It’s the bottom-rung of society, and perhaps the most transparent example in the game of Liberty City’s underbelly. When you find your target, asleep on a mattress in his dingy room, it seems almost as though you’re putting him out of his misery.

Killing comes all too easily for Niko, but in this instance, you can’t feel too bad – which, really, is every bit as chilling as agonizing over it. The other came during a rather important story mission, the details of which I won’t go into so as to not spoil anything, suffice to say that it ended with me shooting down a former contact as he desperately tried to break open a door to escape from me.

But the initial shots didn’t kill him – as I stood over him, pistol aimed at his head, he whimpered, realising that begging would do nothing, crying “I’m going to die!” and I lined up my shot. Amazingly, my head shot didn’t kill him. A glitch, or a fault in game design? Probably. But still, it heightened the scene’s impact immensely – forcing me to pull the trigger a second time on this man, the terror in his voice and the way he tried to bust open that door…it was intense.

Much, much later in the game – a good fifty-five to sixty hours later, in fact, we after finishing the story mode – I was wrapping up all the game’s ‘random encounters’. These involve ‘running into’ people on the map who need your help, and is honestly best tackled with a guide by your side because otherwise it requires a lot of driving around and hoping.

Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but those who have experienced the moment will know what I’m refering to – almost immediately after meeting up with this guy, he dies. Hit by a car. It’s not your fault. The guy was going mad, and you simply tried to talk some sense into him. Niko, despite himself, hasn’t realised that expecting sense in Liberty City is an absurd ideal. GTA IV, like a lot of the great American literature of the 1950s-60s, is all about the idea of the ‘American Dream’.

By this point in the game, Niko was richer than he had any need to be, yet still I had him collect the money from this man’s corpse. After the ‘Four Leaf Clover’ mission, money in GTA IV essentially serves an entirely symbolic purpose: once you become wealthy, you realise there’s nothing worth spending the money on. From a gameplay perspective, it’s irritating, but put into a symbolic context, one could summarize that it serves as a comment on Nico’s drive and desire to achieve the ‘American Dream’ through wealth.

Towards the end of the game, the narrative droops as the player – and Niko – lose sight of what it is, exactly, they’re killing for. Niko’s end goal (revenge) seems absurd once he is in a position to achieve it, and the life lessons he learns come at the cost of his soul.

In any case, after this man was run over, I stood and watched as the scene played out. The man who ran him over got his phone out, called for an ambulance, and drove off. Despite everything he and I had done, somehow I had to let Niko have a tender moment here.

I waited with the body for the ambulance to arrive. He wasn’t a good man, and during our brief association I’d seen him do some terrible things, but considering what I myself had done, who was I to pass judgment? It may have been a self-imposed action, but for the minute it took for the ambulance to arrive, I felt the kind of total immersion that games so very rarely evoke.

Stay tuned for the second part of what will likely be a three-part examination of GTA IV in the lead-up to my Gay Tony review. There’s still so very much to discuss.

Australia’s terribly archaic classification system has claimed another victim. The news broke earlier today that Classifications Board have deemed the game “unsuitable for a minor to see or play”, which means that now none of us get to play. More post jump.

Reading through the report (linked below), the central issues seem to be that the player is killing ‘infected humans’ rather than zombies (which is more of a genre in-joke than anything else), and the messy blood splatters, dismembered limbs and decapitations left behind after unleashing the melee weapons on the zombie hordes.

It’s probably fair to say that this won’t be taken sitting down by the Australian gaming public, or hopefully Valve themselves. For now, all I can say is that this is hugely disappointing news, and it’s disheartening to live in a country with such a ridiculously outdated classification system.

There have been countless articles, letters and impassioned blog/forum posts made on the subject already, but the point still stands – our rating system is broken to the point of genuine negligence, and until South Australian attorney general Michael Atkinson and anyone else standing in the way of a proper R18+ rating for Australian games comes to their senses, we’re going to be looked down upon in pity by the global gaming industry.

Source.

War, it has been said time and time again, is Hell. On the virtual battlefields of recent war games, more of an effort is being made to portray the harsh realities of warfare. The best example is, of course, Call of Duty 4; it is a war story of broken men out for blood, dicey international relationships and the grim reality of the front line. It was a ballsy story for sure – without spoiling it, the event that occurs at the end of Act 1 is gut-wrenching in a way few war stories can achieve.

The first Modern Warfare game was hugely emotionally involving and draining. For the second game, I’d like to see them go even further. (Warning: Call of Duty 4/World at War spoilers after the jump).

Call of Duty 4 is, in this writer’s opinion, one of the most effective anti-war pieces, game or otherwise, of the last decade. This can be attributed in large part to the AC-130 gunship level, a set-piece made effectively terrifying by just how easy it is to obliterate other human beings. It’s not a fight; it’s a slaughter, and it’s all too plausible a scenario. As you rain bullets and bombs down on the soldiers below, the dull, bored narration of the events occurring is enough to make your skin crawl.

Beyond that, the men you’re fighting alongside have all been touched by the war in ways that have damaged their outlook and have desensitized them to their own actions – not to mention, most of them die. There’s more detail that could have gone into here about the overarching causes of the war, the righteousness of either side or even the general portrayal of fictional outbreaks in games, but that’s not so important for now.

Treyarch’s World at War, similarly, lays it on thick towards the end of the Russian campaign. Just before you enter into the German subway station, you’re tasked with, essentially, cleaning up the mess you’ve just made. Injured German soldiers lay dying on the ground, and in a moment, it parallels the opening of the campaign quite expertly; you must slaughter the already dying troops. The rest of the Russian campaign follows in a similar fashion: Russian victory is all but assured, and your mission is now more about revenge and glory than protecting the motherland. World at War was nowhere near as elegant in how it crafted its narrative, but it still got the point across.

And yet for all these achievements across both games, the final interactive moment of Call of Duty 4 (World at War isn’t quite worth mentioning at this point) is a little bit of an action cop-out, especially when you compare Soap’s fate to that of atomic bomb victim Paul Jackson earlier in the game. The gun slides into Soap’s hands, and with three shots, you save your life and wipe out a major threat – killing Zakhaev certainly won’t win the war, but it’s a serious dent in the other side’s armor. Things haven’t ended well by any stretch, but you’ll still return as a hero.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that Soap should have died. Simply, the more I think about it, the more room I see to really get under the player’s skin in a game like this. I’d love to see Infinity Ward craft a war game where we don’t simply die, or get injured, or see our entire squad get mowed down – I want to actually experience losing a war. And not in the way the idea has been explored in, say, games set during the Vietnam War – I want it to be a fictional conflict, and I want to be convinced that I’m going to win.

I can’t even begin to imagine how it must feel to be truly defeated in a war situation. No country willingly steps into a conflict they don’t expect to somehow profit from. Nationalism – arguably the primary catalyst for both World Wars – involves a powerful belief in the nation you’re fighting for, and an absolute certainty that they will prevail. Losing under those circumstances, even in a simulated conflict, would have to be emotionally devastating. The idea that even our best efforts can’t always win the fight is one explored on a much, much smaller scale in the multiplayer modes in these games, so why not incorporate it into the main campaigns?

Some may argue that there needs to be some sort of reward at the end of a gaming experience, but haven’t game narratives evolved past that point? Already games have done a terrific job of showing us that there are real ‘winners’ in war, but surely by now that’s a tired point, no matter how well it’s told; it’s a lesson that holds a different value for the side that actually loses in the conventional sense. Whether this would mean taking on the role of a foreign invasion or simply portraying the loss of the Allied forces, I’d love to see an interactive exploration of the devastation of losing out in a massive conflict, one that will affect everyone and everything your virtual avatar was fighting for.

Having said all this, I don’t think it’s likely we’ll see any such game plot emerging anytime soon. The idea of taking on the role of the ‘enemy’ troops isn’t going to appeal to the majority of the Modern Warfare audience, and judging by the way a lot of players carry on at the end of multiplayer matches, they certainly don’t like losing. But the first Modern Warfare moved me. It really got under my skin and made me think about the events I had just experienced. I want the ante upped. I want a game experience that educates me on an emotional level in a way that other games haven’t dared to try.

Console war can do awful things to a man. In the spring of 2005, I returned from the frontlines of the Playstation 2 Massacre as a decorated Nintendo hero, but the badges I’d drawn onto the jacket I designed in MS Paint were nothing on the badges on my Gamecube memory card.

I saw some awful things on the internet battlefield.

Grown men reduced to babbling idiots over Halo 2. Nintendo fans brutally eviscerated by the Sony militia after the Capcom RE4 double-cross. Supposedly neutral territories littered with the bodies of Sega fanboys – and mere boys, many of them were – their copies of Jet Set Radio permanently grasped in their rigor mortised hands.

I suspect I was under investigation by my own people – now that the war is over, I can admit to harbouring a fugitive Xbox and games, purchased one sorry Christmas when Double Dash simply didn’t deliver the decisive victory we had all been hoping for. Because of it’s failure in Japan, the very home of Nintendo, we didn’t see it as the main enemy anyway.

Yet still I had to bear this cross for the entire war, as much as I enjoyed Burnout 3. It was a secret I kept from the troops I adopted under my command – miyaMoTofan, pikminachu, lgndofzelda04, smash___brothaa and sofine69, each of them good, albeit simple men. Our mission was simple: we dropped into gaming forums all over the internet to fight the good fight for the Great Purple Hope.

Nintendo hadn’t given us much to fight with: the Gamecube’s sales figures were terrible, that handle at the back left us wide open to ‘lunchbox’ insult attacks and for some reason the idea of offering decent storage or any sort of online gameplay seemed to baffle our superiors.

Furthermore, for strategic reasons they refused to adopt us as official company mascots. But dammit, we put on a show for those Sony-loving bastards.

By repeatedly posting lists of games we enjoyed, meticulously copying examples from magazines of how Gamecube ports were excelling over PS2 versions, calling our opponents ‘faggots’ at every turn and filling our signatures with oversized images stating our dominance, it’s fair to say that we caused quite a few Sony fans to literally die of embarrassment for owning a PS2 in the early years of the war.

We called this one 'The Battle of Iowa Gamer'.

Sure, things didn’t always go as planned. One particular encounter still haunts my dreams some nights. My men had spent an entire night spamming the word ‘ZELDA!’ over and over again onto Tom Wilson’s Videogame Fan Page Forums. Of the other sixteen forum members, only one was able to see the posts before the site’s admins sprung a sneak attack on us.

The banning from Tom Wilson didn’t injure my men, but it sure as hell demoralized them. smash_brothaa even changed his screen name from ‘harrison- gamecube 4eva dudez!’ to ‘harrison wats the point anymore i dont even get it’. Even I ballooned in weight following the banning – it wasn’t until months later that I worked my way back down to a slender 145kg. But nothing could keep us down for too long.

Wherever we went, other forum members knew us as ‘the basterds’ (or ‘bastards’, on the forums with higher spelling standards). It was a name we carried with pride, one that came to symbolise how much we were shaking up our enemies. Whenever there was a slight spike in Gamecube sales, an exclusive that scored over 90 on IGN or a vague announcement that some new games might come out or be announced, eventually, we knew that we were somehow a part of it.

In one of our proudest victories, a young man by the name of admiral__butthead told us, on what was primarily a PC forum, that he would ‘buy a gamecube as long as we all shut up’. Pikminachu even took it upon himself to make a solo mission into Sony-occupied France (on a forum called Playstation Amore) and, using Babelfish, questioned the size of each and every member’s penis.

The sheer devastation of his assault cannot be denied. A rough translation of the thread revealed some amazing replies, including, incredibly, an offer to provide us with a cream capable of extending the length of our own penises (which we all agreed we wouldn’t be needing until after the war was over, by which stage, we’re sad to say, the forum had burnt down to the ground).

But it would be a lie to say that things ended cleanly for the Basterds. In November 2004, our troupe was still reeling from the announcement of Capcom’s deception. Although a mere year later we would be celebrating over the Playstation 2′s inferior version of Resident Evil 4, we found ourselves willing to take desperate action against our oppressors.

On reflection it was a dumb plan, and I shouldn’t have led my men in there – several of them were well under the site’s required age of 12 – but we had balls of pure steel, and hearts made from some other metal that was even harder than steel.

And so, I led my men onto Sony Europe’s forums. And there, we saw the true horrors of the Console Wars.

Stay tuned for Chapter 2 of Joipadless Basterds. Eventually.