Where are all the cowboy games? Bald marines seeking crouch-level cover emerge from the shadowy, inexplicably-brown wastes of the industry’s finest on a weekly basis, whilst the sheer brutality and unique charisma of the western era has gone largely ignored. Thankfully, Rockstar have kicked down that paticular door recently with the fantastic Red Dead Redemption, so hopefully many more devs will step up and give us more adventures in this interesting setting!

Hopefully, they’ll be better than this game. Nope, I’m not reviewing Red Dead Redemption. Partly because I know what my final rating would be, and partly because it would torpedo my scholastic career for all eternity. No, this is a multiplayer-only indie outlaw-em-up, developed by newcomers FatShark. Well, okay, not “newcomers” exactly, but “GRIN 2: License Harder” isn’t as polite. They seem to be following the path of their precursors: One good 2D Bionic Commando game, followed by a bunch of crap and a swift bankruptcy. And unfortunately for them, there are no grappling hook arms in this game.

The premise is pretty familiar – two teams, with members selecting from a choice of brightly dressed unique-looking gunslingers with different talents and weapons, compete in various attack/defend game modes in a collection of desert-based landscapes. That sound you heard was either Valve rolling their eyes really hard, or the splashback from them diving into their Scrooge McDuck-style money pool. They can’t be feeling too threatened by this, though, since I played this through a free weekend on Steam. Which is good, cause it saved me money.

The primary problem with the game, surprisingly, is not in it’s derivative gameplay but in the netcode. I’m not sure what kind of bizarre, half-broken code GRI–… FatShark, sorry, uses to create a situation where a server hosted by a random bittorrenting idiot on a 56k connection gives me a better ping than every dedicated server running, but I’m pretty sure some kind of Invisible War-level fiasco was going on behind the scenes there. The fact that Dedicated Servers – a kind of vital part of any PC shooter worth it’s shaders – were haphazardly patched in well after launch further implies that something’s kind of gone horrifically wrong somewhere down the line. And the game’s initials being LaG… well, that’s just rubbing salt in the wound, really.

A multiplayer game that actively fights my attempts to play it with other people is something I can’t actively recommend. I give it one out of the four cowboy games that exist.

So, this is what I’ve been toying with lately. It’s a TF2 hud. It’s pretty neat. You should try it.

(Spoilers: It’s actually a scale model on a spring in front of a green screen)

The Great Giana Sisters is a Super Mario Bros. ripoff. THERE I SAID IT. Course, this is not some startling new revelation: The original game came out in 1987, and lasted all of five minutes before Nintendo swarmed upon it like a pack of angry wildebeest. 20-something years later, the game returned in a new form on the DS and iPhone, somehow managing to avoid Nintendo’s wandering eye despite once again leaping into their kitchen, eating all their food, and probably pooping in the fireplace.

The storyline, as with all platform games, is of entirely no consequence, and frankly I can’t even remember it. You play Giana, as you run from one end of a level to the other, grabbing diamonds, throwing fireballs and stomping on not-Goombas. There’s clearly nothing groundbreaking about this, but it’s quite fun and has a decent amount of personality, with enemies shooting a glare at the camera as you jump over them and C64-style music setting the retro tone.

The thing that makes or breaks classic-style games on iOS devices is the controls, and Giana fares very well here – the lack of a run button means you can focus on precision jumping and shooting, and it’s honestly the most comfortable platforming control scheme I’ve felt on the device yet. This is a good thing, because the later levels were clearly made with the DS in mind, with lots of precision jumping and generally bastardly enemy placement, so every bit of dexterity allowed by the controls counts.

Not everything is great, though – the graphics, aside from Giana, are all poorly upsized from the DS version using a scaling filter, robbing them of some of their pixel-art beauty. Perhaps more crucially a problem, though, every boss is the fucking same. I don’t mean that in that you use the same trick on different bosses, I mean it’s the exact same boss, only slightly harder and needing an extra hit before he dies! Oh, and the room tileset is different. This might have been okay in 1987, but considering the polish on the rest of the game, it feels especially lazy, and marrs the experience.

Overall, the game is fantastically polished with the exception of a few grubby stains, diabolically hard in the later stages, and has a wonderful retro feeling. I give it six out of seven filter-resized sprites.

Not pictured: The vast amounts of coke consumed in this decision making process.

How does this even play? I want to find out, but not enough to buy a Japanese phone.

"A CAKE."

So, Deus Ex is 10 years old now, and as such is celebrating it’s birthday by being absurdly cheap on Steam. If you’re reading this and somehow don’t have it, you are a shameful, shameful person, and should alleviate this post-haste. If you have got DX, than you should probably get the modern launcher, DX10 renderer and maybe BioMod.

And here‘s some longtime British PC gaming journalists (and thus the most depressed people on earth) having a good old chinwag on the subject. Some interesting points raised! But are they interesting enough to stop me from heading back to Liberty Island long enough to read them? No, no they are not.

Not pictured: Stretched, sweaty “TEAM GAZ” t-shirt (Click for bigger)

So, Modern Warfare 2. Whilst porky jailbait everywhere has been eagerly trembling (and wobbling, probably) at the thought of the next Harry Potter or Twilight, their older, hairier, possibly fatter brothers have generally been quivering in anticipation for the next entry in the storied Call of Duty series. Starting as Another Generic World War 2 Series, the series took a sudden, violent turn in 2007 towards the present day, trading in it’s MP40s and Nazis in for AK47s and Potential Nuclear Disaster. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare blitzed to sudden extreme popularity on the strength of a action-packed single player campaign and an impressive multiplayer mode.

Since then, though, things haven’t been quite as great. Eager to keep CEO Bobby Kotick’s demon soul quenched with the blood of infants, Activision shipped the franchise off to sometimes-collaborators Treyarch to take the series back to World War 2 in Call of Duty: World At War, a game that was stunningly mediocre. And for every exciting announcement regarding Modern Warfare 2, there was always a counter-announcement to drop enthusiasm back down to managable levels. And as the crowds wailed about a high price, no dedicated servers on PC and other issues, Kotick laughed, reclined in his Throne Of Skulls and sipped from a tiny femur-chalice with mild bemusement. Probably.

But the game’s out now! And in my hands! Which means that all the speculation must now clear way for cold, hard, throbbing fact: Is Modern Warfare 2 Worth The Wait?

To which I can answer, “Uh, I suppose so? Yeah.”

I have yet to really get far in the game, but the game seems to be all about taking what was in MW1, and somehow both polishing and expanding it while keeping to the time-tested method. Everything is bigger and brighter, and generally everything’s more… fun, I suppose.

Once I play more and complete the single player campaign, I’ll do a full review. For now though, know that if you liked the previous games, you should probably look into getting a hold of this.

When it was announced that Bethesda, a studio with many years of experience in medieval fantasy RPGs, would be resurrecting the long dormant cult classic series Fallout, fanboys all over the internet swept into a violent fury that the series’ dead, long bankrupt creators would not be doing the job. The rage only increased upon the revelation that it would not be an isometric, turn based game running at 640×480 like the originals, but a high resolution 3D game like Oblivion. But while the accusations that Fallout 3 would just be a lazy pallete shift of Beth’s previous game increased, the studio had learned from past mistakes, and delivered a RPG tour de force that, while far from perfect, is still a great way to while away the hours.

The world of Fallout is not, in any way shape or form, a happy place. Set in an alternate history where the world never quite moved past the 1950s culture-wise and the Cold War came to a much less peaceful, much more apocalyptic ending, the game sees the player-created Lone Wanderer escaping from his Vault (a nuclear shelter where people have lived out their lives in a twisted form of pre-war normalcy for generations) into the irradiated ruins of Washington D.C. to try and find his/her father, and stumbling across a secret that could, for better or worse, change the Capitol Wasteland forever.

Pleasingly, the game lets you conduct business more or less as you please. You can be a polite do-gooder saving the hardy survivors from the many slavers, mutated beasts and monstrosities that the Wasteland throws up, or you can be a complete and total bastard that counts the aforementioned slavers as close personal friends. You can follow the plot, or ignore the gentle hand-holding and explore the wasteland as you wish. You can fight in real time like a FPS, or use the “VATS” system to pause the game and target individual body parts to attack in slow motion like the original turn-based games.

One particular favorite feature of mine is the Perks system, back from the original isometric games. As you gain experience and level up, you can select Perks, which let you customize and specialize your character in specific ways, from the useful (improving your accuracy when using specific weapon types) to the character-specific (Are you a mean bastard? Do you hang out with horrible people? Why not complete the set and take up Cannibalism?) to the amusing (The infamous and self-explanitory “Bloody Mess” perk makes a much-awaited return!).

The game, however, is far from perfect. Animations feel stiff and poorly done. The well-acted conversations are relayed by a character model staring blankly at a static camera. Combat can be stiff and clunky if you don’t rely on VATS, which while awesome makes the game much, much easier. Glitches abound, and the UI feels optimised for a console, leaving PC gamers feeling a little left out (it’s a world ahead of Oblivion’s awful interface, though!)

However, much of this can be forgiven, for when the pieces come together, they come together well, and hard – it’s hard not to supress a grin upon finding a horde of well-armed, well-embedded opponents and chunkifying them all by way of skill, ability and superior firepower, or upon escaping a sinister abandoned facility caked in monster bits and down to your last few bullets, but with what you were looking for tucked safely under your arm. At it’s high points, Fallout 3 reaches the same great heights as it’s predecessors in a much more accessible way.

Fallout 3 is a fantastic game, although I recommend the PC version for modding potential. I give it eight furious manchildren out of ten.

If there’s one thing I love more than chocolate (and that’s a big call), it’s filling blank speech bubbles with crap. I dug up a bunch of such ventures into this less-than-loved craft, and have decided to upload some of them.

Several months ago, GoodOldGames threw a caption contest to give away some games. I never heard back, so I can politely assume I didn’t win. I wonder why?