thequillguy

Currently on regular sale on steam for under a tenner, Max Payne 3 happily fills the linear action shooter niche, complete with laughable dialogue and well-paced action. The story is predictably hammy throughout, yet pleasingly self-referential. Cover-glitch issues and unskippable cut-scenes sadly pull this down into an 8/10, but there isn't any to match what Max can bring. Read more at ****/2013/03/max-payne-3.html

Playing an aptly named Grand Campaign on Medieval Total War 2 for the past two years has given me a new found appreciation for the RTS genre. If you read my review of the original shogun experience, you would have thought Iâ

Amnesia is not a game you play to win; it is a game to win to stay alive. The tutorial screen says this is the attitude with which you should approach this game. Itâ

Left 4 Dead offers the greatest multiplayer experience with strangers so far. Even if you do not like FPS games, or western zombie culture with its pretentious assertion that it all represents something else a little bit deeper, I warrant youâ

The challenge of designing a football game is to achieve the balance between the theatre of realism and arcade controls. PES 2009 achieves this, even though it is far from perfection. ****/2011/04/pes-2009-review.html

PC gamers often complain about the issues of porting console (action) games. To be truth, I find many of the arguments elitist and a little empty (take the issue of Portal 2 showing a â

Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is experiencing a great film. And great films - like great some games - never appear linear; their finite stories belie the seemingly expansive possibilities of their genre. The reality is, of course, that the action of an FPS offers only a limited number of scenarios. However, done well, these scenarios offer both the serious and the casual gamer well-crafted slices of unreal action. Not least because the army down-plays the getting-shot-aspect of real life. ****/2011/04/call-of-duty-modern-warfare.html

For those who enjoyed the smashing board game, this bloody realisation is a faithful recreation. Those who donâ

As I write this review I am readying myself to embark on yet another adventurer into the realm of Calradia. But in terms of â

Batman Arkham Asylum opens with several minutes **** cut scene. It can't be skipped. And I've seen it three times and still not been bored. In fact, this reminds me of what makes this game so good; you never have to see the same scene more than three times in a row. As an action adventure, it is so well balanced, I never died more than three times in a scene. ****/2011/04/batman-arkham-asylum.html

Engaging enormous engines of war in battle should be more difficult than this. It certainly was in the original - and much loved - supreme commander. The difficulty, for some, is that while the game looks the same, the economy itself is inherently different. ****/2011/04/supreme-commander-2-review.html For starters, unlike the original it is difficult to run short of mass and energy - the two resources needed to power the production of units. This is coupled with the emphasis on upgrading a few core units, rather than producing, and memorising, a plethora of the-same-but-a-bit-different tanks. I still remember now an old friend telling me, during a mutliplayer of medieval total war, that he intended to build his army from as many different, and obscure, troop types as possible, thus as to ensure that I didn't have a clue what I was fighting, or how to counteract it. Such beardiness has been devastated in Supreme Commander 2. Instead what you have is an engaging game that allows the easy(ier) building of experimentals - **** robots capable of destroying an army single-handed. Their names are as ridiculous as their power - King Kriptor, for one! Admittedly, if you had dedicated a substantial amount of time to perfecting your build orders to the second, then this game will frustrate you. If you had an inherent knowledge of how the dozens of different basic units counteracted each other, then this game will feel like an imposter. Indeed, the smaller maps (often strangely cramped due to extra scenary) will tone down the epic feeling for those expert at the original. For me, though, it is perfect. Having stalled on the tutorial for several months, I managed to give the game a morning. In those few hours, I had won skirmishes will all the sides (which feel, and look, genuinely different), unlocked all the experimental units and progressed in the campaign. I have tried some multiplayer, and enjoyed the epicness of it all (something served by an incredible soundtrack.) For those on PC, this game has also regularly dropped to £2.50, which is a farcical price. You simply must own this game for that amount of money. Very incisive descriptions of why the game feels 'broken' to the experts of the original exist, but suffice to say that if, like me, you play many different genres, this is a wonderful addition that allows you 20-60mins of intensely satisfying RTS at a time.

Nearly ten year ago the snowy rain fell on Hull like all the angels in heaven had decided to colloquially urinate at the same time. And so opened this innovative action adventure for me: I had a weekend to kill, it was snowing outside, and I had no heating. I didn't want the intellectually intensity of a strategy game, nor did I want to frenetic multitasking of a RTS. With a blanket on my legs, I sat down and completed this game in 10 hours without even a toilet break. And the first thing I did? Began again. After a toilet break. Max Payne pitches perfect progressive difficulty. Action games can shouldn't - in my busy world - kill you more than three times at the same point more than three times in a game. You shouldn't be slugging through a game with a face as pained as Payne's permanently constipated expression. Instead you should be smiling appreciatively at just how awesome it feels to burst horizontally through a door (in slow motion) and expertly twisting through your hips as you innerringly shoot three baddies with your John Woo pistols before time jolts back into the present and all three baddies fall down at the same time. Whump. This is not a serious game, but it is seriously evocative. The weapons, even now, feel powerful. I can remember a scene where a baddie hideing behind an apartment door unfortunately proclaims that he intends to shoot you as you come in. He doesn't, but you should, expect to leap towards him while simultaneously opening said door while unleashing a full shotgun blast to his chest that lifts him several feet in the air. You can almost hear Chuck, I mean Max, saying, "not today bozo." These scenes occur tirelessly throughout the game. Face an impossible situation. Engage bullet time (copied from the Matrix). Shoot all enemies. Read film noir comics. While the game itself is not so serious, what should be a series consideration is the known (and ongoing) compatibility issues with steam. Unfortunately the download can open fail to name the weapons file correctly which can result in the game simply not starting. While I managed to get it work (on occasion) you cannot expect Steam to help you out on this one. Much better to buy on amazon. Fortunately the game gleefully leads you on a deeply humorous (if a little silly) adventure once you have got the thing working. The dialogue between the baddies is priceless. Not to mention the subplot of the Lords and Ladies TV series - "My Lord! My Lady! My Lord!" - which goes on for about twenty minutes if you halt your carnage to watch the many analogue TV sets scattered throughout the game. Take this game for what it is - a romping film-noir - and you'll find an outstandingly crafted adventure that is also a piece of gaming history.

Shogun Total War is one of those games that allows you dream of how to gloriously command thousands (or, at least, dozens) of screaming samurai. By allowing devious flanking tactics, or encouraging heroic frontal assaults, STW was the first game to depict the frantic action of real time strategy with mainstream success. Which, when you consider that the game was originally intended as a 2D strategy game, makes this game a definitive milestone of the RTS genre. The strength of game is its simplified unit interaction: like paper (spears), scissors (cavalry) and stone (archers) ever unit beats and counters an other unit. Unlike the expansive RTS units of SupComm or SCII, mastery of unit types should be expected in hours rather than weeks. There's no seeking for the 'overbalanced' unit combination or the perfect build-order in this game; only blood and thunder battlefield fighting. Ten years after first release, the gameplay still holds up surprisingly well. The kill rate of units is low (perhaps too low!) but this places a greater emphasis on the paper-scissor-stone principles by which the game runs. Add into this the significant effect of hills (archers will beat infantry with a height advantage in melee) and flanking (even now tying an enemy head-on with infantry and flanking with cavalry is the RTS staple tactic) and you have warfare that is satisfyingly expansive. By expansive I mean there is a real feeling that a smaller army can defeat much larger numbers with superior tactics. Such victories exploit the game's excellent morale model. You don't need to kill every soldier to win a battle. Even now I can remember battles a decade imprinted on my memory - the enemy ushered through a valley to attack my weakened archers; the hidden charge from woods; and the routing of one flank that rolls down the rest of the enemy until a fresh force flees from my emergent (and no doubt grinning) general. The campaign mode itself was pleasingly simplified. I always played as Shimazu (the green ones) not least because they were tucked away in the corner. As always in such strategy games, no-one has yet devised a way to counteract strategic AI. In the end game, I always faced off the Hojo clan who had horded dozens of armies into a few spaces. While something that I accepted at the time, these days such a gameplay facet would (rightly) demand a patch, or simply recognise that the campaign is won when 50% of map is yours. The expansion pack (part of this game) goes some way to addressing these problems but it still lets slip with the overpowered brutality of the mongol heavy cavalry. Having spent 100s of battles watching body counters drop a man at a time, the shock at seeing multiple people die at once is enough to make the mongol expansion feel like the challenge of countering a truly warmonging race with what are essentially a civilised people. So should you own and play this game because it defined a genre? The graphics are, admittedly, pixilated with a 680 resolution. The campaign can drag on. Heavy cavalry aren't my first choice when I have infinite money. And the bridge battles are immensely arduous tests of attrition. But the immersion is still there. The sound is evocative of the Sengoku period and the battlefield principles are still refreshingly straightforward and effective. If you win a battlefield, you really feel a sense of control. Even more so than a ctrl + A then right click on their general. I've owned three copies of this game - you should grace your collection with one.