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.

I’m still poking out the kinks, changing the locks and basically me-ising it, but it looks nice enough to acknowledge right now, so I am.

Thanks to Techokami for removing the encrypted spam ads in the theme footer (Seriously? That’s how low we’ve gone?) and Google’s fancy Web Fonts mcdoover for fonting this baby up.

Last night in the depths of my unconscious mind, a member of The Decemberists (a band I have never heard, let alone know what they look like) had somehow, via some unspecified means, lost usage of both legs. Completely paraplegic. And for some reason, it was now my duty to fulfill his wish to be cast into the sea. From a great height. From a helicopter.

I don’t know either.