CASTLEVANIA: LORDS OF SHADOW – MIRROR OF FATE

I’ve personal owned almost every Nintendo handheld. There also been one game beside Mario game that I’ve played on a almost every hand held. That would be Castlevania (I have played Dawn of Sorrow, Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow and also Symphony of the Night). So after a rather lengthy hiatus from the Nintendo's portable systems. 

I was rather excited to see Castlevania: Lords of Shadow- Mirror of Fate that I picked it up without hesitant because I would be a great game.My first indication that the game might not been great was the name. Mirror of Fate just didn't have the same level of fantasy inspired stupidity of Harmony of Dissonance or Aria of Sorrow. I wasn't fired up by the idea of a mirror of fate, all I could think of was the main character sitting in front of a mirror getting their hair brushed by the hand of fate. Any other time I read a castlevania title its more meet with a WFT is a Harmony of Dissonance ??. I dont know but I want to punch in the face then throw holy water all over just to make sure its dead.

This iteration of Castlevania was very heavy on daddy issue. You play almost each generation of the Belmont clan in this game as they fight their way through the mysterious castle to either battle their father. You play as three separate characters: Simon, Alucard, and Trevor split into three Acts, one for each character, and you explore different sections of the castle at different points in history. It plays out in a nonlinear fashion, like some kind of Quentin Tarantino's movie. Also one of the main problems of the game. Its builds up to three separate climaxes, so by the time you reach the end of the Act III, the impact of the final battle lacks any real tension. It also doesn't help that the "twist" ending was telegraphed all the way back in Act I. The way the characters' stories tangle together was satisfying for me but story has never been the main reason to play Castlevania. You play this game to whip evil.

It did take me awhile to get into the game visual style. I’ve always loved the 2d drawn style of the previous games. I got annoyed several times at the 3D backgrounds that clearly showed door that look like I should be able to walk down them to explore. Really just there for decoration and atmosphere. The infusion of God of War like quick time events where a nice addition that helped spice the game up just when I was getting bored of whipping things. 

 The combo system feels nice to play, it is responsive, and the new moves/powers make you feel more powerful as the game advances. Boss fights are decent and require different tactics to defeat. Think this is the first game where boss fights had in fight save points, that would ensnaring you in a perpetual animation loop. 

Only got annoy a few times. The biggest negative points are the repetitive soundtrack,backtracking and leveling up. Could easily have fixed the backtracking with hub areas to connect the castle sections. Previous castlevania games had robust leveling up system. Feels like the developers decided getting the chance to play as the same character 3 times would make up for that. Least they were smart enough to give each character enough distinctive move set to distinguish each of them. Since when were the Belmonts Scottish? pretty sure Scotland and Transylvania are very nearly on opposite ends of the continent.

Mirror of Fate does have some high notes. The graphics are most definitely among the best on the 3DS, and the stereoscopic effect is likewise top notch. In fact, this is the first 3DS title for which I left the 3D slider on max from start to finish. Even more impressive than the in-game visuals are the cut-scenes, The only knock against it is that the characters' mouths weren't animated to sync with their speech. It like watching an old kung-fu movie bad.If you  enjoy adventuring through mysterious castle of daddy issue awaiting you. I highly recommend the ridiculous named CASTLEVANIA: LORDS OF SHADOW – MIRROR OF FATE.

3 and a half mysterious Scottish whipping vampire killing waffles.

GAME REVIEW: THE DARKNESS 2 (X-Box 360)

The Darkness 2 is a game that left me wanting more. It followed on from The Darkness, one of my favourite games on the X-Box 360, and so it had some high expectations to live up to. The Darkness 2 mostly lives up to these expectations, even if it stumbles at times. For me, this was a game that oozed style. From the comic-like art style to the strong narrative, The Darkness 2 captured my attention. It also helped that it was pretty fun just to use my super-powers to rampage around and tear apart my enemies.

The Darkness 2 has you reprise your role as Jacqui, a current mob leader, who has acquired the titular evil supernatural entity, The Darkness. The Darkness is meant to be a primordial force of the universe and it does give Jacqui some pretty awesome powers. He can use them to rip his enemies apart, summon an imp familiar or pick up objects. Unfortunately, this is where the game first stumbles. The game has a pretty clear distinction between what you can pick-up/hit/tear-apart, and what you can’t. This sometimes leads to some very confusing situations where you can’t pick-up certain things, but for the most part the game handles this pretty well. It just still feels odd that you can’t shoot a light through a grill or tear the grill apart, but instead must find the power generator.

The games narrative kicks off with an evil cult trying to steal The Darkness power to give them power or maybe just to control it to stop it doing any more harm. In order to achieve this the cult attacks you. After fighting them off, you and your henchmen go out to get revenge. The violence slowly escalates as Jacqui loses someone close to him and fights off attempts to take the Darkness away, which does feel like rehashing the first game a little bit.

The story doesn’t really have any big twists (at least, until the ending), but it keeps the pace up as you move through levels bringing death and destruction to your enemies. Between missions, you are given Jacqui sitting in a pool of light talking about his past with a semi-washed out look. The graphics are a gritty, realistic take on a dark comic-style look. This helps give The Darkness 2 it’s own unique style.

No amount of style can save The Darkness 2 from starting to feel repetitive, however. The enemies feel like they repeat in a fairly linear fashion. It is only towards the end of the game where you get some enemy variety, with some enemies able to teleport, disarm you or holding portable lights. However, allot of these new enemies end up feeling like busy-work due to how your supernatural powers work.

The Darkness retreats with any light. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that it also makes your vision go blurry and it starts damaging you, even for things like street lights or headlights. The primordial force of the universe is scared of any light, so you just end up finding cover, shooting out the lights and then picking off enemies. I wonder what happens when Jacqui has to go out in the sun, or why he isn’t damaged walking around his mansion. A better alternative would be The Darkness just going away, which is what they did in the original if memory serves me correctly.

No review of the Darkness 2 would be complete without talking about the ending. Near the end of the game, they start bringing up an anti-Darkness being and it’s importance in keeping the universe in balance (between order and chaos, good and bad, etc.). When the (fairly obvious) twist is revealed of Jacqui’s former (and now dead) lover being this being of light, the game abruptly ends. The climax of the game undermined the cult being the major villain by introducing this being, so the abrupt ending didn’t sit well with the overall narrative.

Even if it stumbled, The Darkness 2 is still a good game. It still oozes style, has cool powers for you to use and a pretty strong narrative driving it forward. I had great fun rampaging around using my super-powers. In my mind, however, the original still provides a much more complete gaming experience (without a dodgy ending).

3.5 out of 5 Dark Waffles.

Knights of Badassdom

In 2011, I saw a trailer that immediately grabbed my attention - Knights of Badassdom. It had a kick-ass title and the trailer seemed to promise a tale similar to Evil Dead but with LARPing. It had everything a fun-loving nerd could ask for: drugs; whiskey; evil book of the dead; and Peter Dinklage in medieval cosplay.

Perhaps anticipation was the biggest factor that killed this movie. After 3 years of broken promises about its release, I was expecting more. What we are left with is a movie that didn't live up to its potential, didn't utilize its impressive cast and didn't deliver any clever or witty dialog.

The main premise is that Joe (Ryan Kwanten from The 6 pack red neck from True Blood ) is dumped by his stuck-up girlfriend Beth (Margarita Levieva). His roommates Hung (Peter Dinklage breakout stars of HBO's Game of Thrones) and Eric (Steve Zahn, once starred alongside Matthew Mcconaughey) promptly pass him a bottle of whiskey and a bong to help nurse his heartbreak. He awakens in full armor at a campsite that medieval reenactors have descended upon for a cosplay extravaganza. While chanting magical poppycock during a wizard ritual, Eric unwittingly summons a demon that takes the shape of Beth and snacks on the hearts of unsuspecting players.

The plot is flat and the characters have very little depth that I ended up creating my own movie while Knights of Badassdom played in the background. Take out John Malkovich from the movie Being John Malkovich and add William Shatner instead. I did have a problem in the second half where I decided that Shatner need to be a shaman because I decided to pay attention to  Knights of Badassdom again and remembered that William Shatner played a Shaman in WOW commercial once. Now I think about it, I would have prefered to watcher William Shatner play WOW for and hour and half instead.

My main problem was that during the movie I just found myself asking too many question about the characters motivations. Why were the redneck paintballers so against the LARPers ? because I don't know. Just seemed like the writer decided to use the cultural shorthand that nerds will always be prosecuted by jocks. Also the editing was dreadful, I rarely notice how a movie is edited. At one point the characters are standing around in daylight then the very next scene its night time.  Honestly there so much about this movie that annoyed me. I cant be bothered writing that long list down. This movie should have been a treat for anybody who's loves playing video games or geek culture. It tried to combine all things geeky to create an cult film and failed. Do yourself a favour and watch the trailer only. Also wonder at the greatest that is William Shatner talking about being a Shaman in WOW.

  a

1 out of 5 the knights of disappointment and waffles

Movie Review: Frozen

Frozen is the latest animated musical movie from Disney which takes the traditional Disney plot points and twists them around into something fresh and new. This movie introduces us to the two  adorable princesses and sisters, Anna and Elsa, as children, just before their parents die. It then jumps ahead to when Elsa comes of age to be Queen. The only catch is that Elsa was born with ice powers She is allot like Iceman, but cooler than the one from the movies. However, her parents died when she was young, her powers are a secret and Professor X didn’t come to her rescue.

At Elsa’s coronation, her powers are revealed to the world after Anna asks to marry her “Prince Charming”, Hans, whom she only just met. This leads to everyone wanting to hurt her. Scared, Elsa proceeds to go off and make a cage of emotions in the mountains, and finally unleashes her power. Anna then goes on a quest to bring Elsa back while Hans looks after the kingdom.

This movie was paced very well. The songs were all upbeat and never felt like they outstayed their welcome (unlike Les Miserables). The story never felt like it dragged out with the plot continuously moving forward. It isn’t often that I sit through a movie that is longer than 2 hours, especially a musical, where I don’t look at my watch at all.

The movie’s story really rests on the sisters, and it is here that Disney really nailed the characters. Elsa is the epitome of coldness and wanting to be left alone, while Anna is warmth and the sort of person that believes in love-at-first-sight. This makes the two sisters polar opposites in the extreme in their view of the world. The supporting cast also plays a memorable role, from the iceman Kristoff who criticizes love-at-first-sight, to the final twist on the traditional Disney formula with Prince Charming Hans.

However, at the conclusion, I did feel that Frozen let itself down. After the twist, this could’ve been set-up to be a classic take on the animated Disney formula. However, the final scene felt like they looked over the edge at what could’ve been, then got scared and wrapped everything up with a standard love-conquers-all, no-lasting-consequences Disney ending. Despite everything I liked about the movie, this ending did feel a bit like a cheat.

But at the end of the day, at least this wasn’t a story about two hopelessly-romantic princesses needing men to save them. In fact, at the conclusion, the main male hero in the story doesn’t play a part as it is up to the sisters to save themselves. And hopefully they won’t make a sequel.

4 out of 5 snap-frozen waffles.

The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is very reminiscent of the choose your own adventure books I used to read as a child. You the reader are told exactly what's happening within the story till you get the choice to either ‘Save the princess’ or ‘Go home and eat Reese's Pieces’ - the reader then flips to the corresponding page and proceeds with the story. The Stanley Parable is pretty much an interactive version of that in videogame form, except you don't have any weapons or even the ability to jump The Stanley Parable might actually be the best walking simulator ever created. You literally just walk stanely around while a god like narrator ( doing there best Stephen Fry’s -Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy impersonation) tells Stanley what to do.


You play non-descript office employee #427, or Stanley. Your job is pretty much being the Irish guy from ‘Lost’ whose main purpose is to press buttons on a keyboard when prompted. Unlike the Irish guy from ‘Lost’’(pretty sure his name is Desmond, but I refuse to google it), Stanely is actually competent at his boring button pressing job and he’s actually content with it. This is until one day he notices all his co workers have disappeared. From this point the player, using the narrator’s guidance, navigates Stanely around the office. On this journey, you’ll see such amazing and magical places like the employee lounge, broom closet, the boss’s office and a mind control facility. Once you’ve helped Stanley achieve his freedom or death the game will restart and you get to do it all over again.Personal I enjoy a game leaves me with deep philosophical questions that go unanswered as long as the journey is weird, dark, and occasionally nonsensical.Your own conclusion is bound to be very different from mine – and that's something we should all celebrate.This might sound like the game could suffer from being repetitive. 

 I had a couple of instances where I chosen the same path as before hoping for a different result only to come to the same conclusion. That’s the moment, for me at least, where I started to take larger deviations from the narrator’s neatly laid out path. At one point I just made Stanley stand in the broom closet for around 5 minutes. When the narrator got annoyed, I made Stanley stay for another 5 minutes to deliberately defy the narrator as he implores you to get back on track. You can't help but notice that, as the narrator angrily addresses Stanley, he's actually talking to you.


After a few play through s you start to ponder what the game is. Is it a an incredibly open-ended sandbox game or an incredibly linear puzzle game. After a few hours of playing it I started to feel like I was stuck in an existential horror story. I then proceed to turn the game off and go for a walk while eating some Reese's Pieces and, sadly, failing to find any princesses that needed saving. This is when I realized that The Stanley Parable is more of a player conducted experiment. The game set out to discover what kind of player you are- Do you want to break stuff ? Do you want to be told what to do? Do you hate being told what to do? Do you just want Stanley to be happy? Or do you want to rule the world?

4 and half out of 5 occasionally nonsensical waffles. 

GAME REVIEW: TORCHLIGHT 2 (PC)

Do you love colourful hack ‘n slash games? Are you a big fan of the Diablo series? Do you like the idea of having a pet goat that can summon zombies and cast fireballs? If so, then I can guarantee that you will love Torchlight 2. While the game isn’t without it’s flaws, Runic Games have managed to craft a tight hack and slash and loot and repeat game that will keep you coming back for just one more dungeon.

Torchlight 2 is the sequel to Torchlight, a game that I have never played. So in effect, I came into this game fresh with only an abiding love of Diablo and Titan Quest. The basic premise of this game is you click to move and attack monsters, loot the map for more powerful equipment, level up your statistics and a skill of your choosing, and then use your newly upgraded character to go attack more powerful monsters and get more powerful loot and even more experience. This may sound like a simple formula but, like most games, it is in this simplicity that all sorts of fun can be had.

From the four classes you can choose from (with the option to change appearances and, shock horror, gender) being Engineer, Embermage, Beserker or Outlander, I chose the Outlander. (because I liked the idea of a dual-pistol slinging cowboy, who I then made female because I could). I also chose a goat as a pet. I then discovered I can teach my goat spells. So I taught him Fireball and Raise Zombie Archers. The inclusion of a pet is genius as you can kit the pet out with spells and items  to cover one of your weaknesses and also send it back to town to sell your loot so you can keep adventuring and looting.

The adventuring and looting are simply fun. The games art-style is semi-cartoony with allot of colorful enemies and locations. Each area has very distinct enemies. From the Netherim (or demons in hell) to the Werewolves that leap out of trees, Torchlight 2 never felt like it was a particularly dark game. It always felt quite bright and colourful while you are zooming around slaying things. One of the definite highlights were the boss battles, as each felt quite epic (even if the difficulty level varied quite a bit). There is nothing quite like running into a teleporter and then fighting a giant beast that takes up half the screen and throws lightning bolts around. I really liked the artistic direction that they took with Torchlight 2 and it helps set it apart from the pack.

Torchlight 2 still had it’s fair share of flaws, however. Among these was quite a varying  difficulty level as you progressed. You could be breezing through an army single-handedly one minute and the next a troll suddenly does 90% damage to you. Even this was somewhat mitigated in that you can just lose a proportion of your gold to instantly respawn. Another frustration was the difficulty in choosing different abilities to use on the fly. This frustration could also be because there were so many abilities that I wanted to us that looked cool but, alas, any more than 2-3 abilities becomes too difficult to use. Mine were Rune Vault, Rapid Fire (with my lovely twin Revolvers, Dante-style), Glaive Throw and Summon Shadowling Brute, which seemed to make allot of the late game bosses quite easy. The difficulty curve on this game definitely felt like it needed a bit more  balance.

These flaws, however, feel like I am just nitpicking. At the end of the day, this is a nice long game that feels like it was crafted with care. The entire game is centred around keeping you engaged and moving, and the mechanics were put there to keep you going through the various beautiful environments. I am sure I haven’t mentioned half the good things in this game (like shared loot, fishing holes for pet upgrades, mods, etc). However, after maybe 16+ hours in the world of Torchlight 2, I am looking forward to diving back in  another 16+ hours with some mods  and a different character. I am thinking Embermage, myself.

4 out of 5 illuminated waffles.

UTOPIA

 Wow? Where did this come from? And why aren't more people watching it?

Utopia it's one of those series that lodges itself into the dark corner of your mind, and it sits there gnawing away at you to watch another episode. Before long its 3am and you have watched the whole thing. Now all you can think about is telling everyone you know about the show so you can debate and converse on the moral ideas and consequence the show brings up.

Utopia centers around a  group of Internet geeks, who are heavily invested in a cult graphic novel called The Utopia Experiments. This novel has gained notoriety for having predicted past global disasters and possible future ones. Beyond the internet forums, a hunt for the cult manuscript is transpiring. Five of its fans then meet in real life to read the fabled, unreleased sequel, and this seamlessly casual meeting puts them in grave danger from a shadowy organization called The Network. 

 The Network operatives are a pair of hit men, overweight Arby and sharp-dressed Lee, who are leaving a trail of dead people in their wake in the pursuit of a  signature question: "Where's Jessica Hyde?" No one seems able to answer this question, but it isn’t like it would save their lives if they did. From there you’re lead down a rabbit hole of Machiavellian plot twists with dire worldwide implications. 

Utopia has such a unique visual style using slightly over saturated colours and many different views, vantage points, colors and contrasts. Almost Kubrick-esque with one-point perspective shots, that give this bleak yet sharp tone its unsettling nature. The series has this constant feeling of menace, isolation and paranoia. It is almost uncomfortable to watch but for the way the plot is revealed in a steady flow.

The characters are wonderfully portrayed and utterly believable. Special credit has to be given to Neil Maskell's portrayal of the overweight 'Arby.’ He plays this darkly comical sad sack and  brings hidden depth to this character that makes you actually start to sympathise with him even though he does some of the worst things you will ever see on screen.

The plot is revealed throughout the six episodes, in true 'Lost' style, with more and more is revealed each time building on what has gone before. Without having to drag you through several season of backstory. Utopia is an amazing show that hit all the right button: Dodgy looking hitman, a secret organisation, political conspiracy theories, some flu outbreak, and a mad scientist to boot.

The 'plot' is revealed in episode 5 and it is as shocking as it is thought provoking. You will find yourself having debates as to its merits with friends and family. I'll say no more about it, but it is brilliant !

5 out of 5 secret cult waffles.