I have a shameful confession to make: I am addicted to Top Model.

I spend most of my work day dealing with situations that are either technically or diplomatically complex, or both, and when I get home of an evening I don’t have the mental energy for anything other than mindless viewing. There are a few programmes on the telly that manage to provide this without causing sufficient aggravation to make me want to kick the box, which is the main problem with soaps. I don’t want angst. I don’t want human relationships. I don’t want anything that will make me cringe. People who are engaged in a competition that is marginally reliant on something resembling skill or ability, and which they think is the most important thing in the world despite it being completely pointless on a practical level, is about my level of braindead television. Project Runway and its UK equivalent occupy a similar niche.

Most of the time Frood goes and does something constructive while I’m in a near-catatonic state of vegetation in front of this programme, however he often comes through for the final judging in which Tyra and company critique the girls.

Frequently the contestants are told to “bring it” and it has exercised us, on a casual basis, to determine what this “it” is. We have been confused. What is “it”? From whence does “it” come? How big is “it”? What does “it” look like?

After careful perusal of advertisements and the sort of programmes that seem to be popular, we think we have determined what “it” is.

According to the Thompson’s advert it can fit in a suitcase. It can’t be overly heavy because the skinny girls on Top Model have to be capable of carrying it. According to a Ministry of Sound advert one is required to inflate it (“pump it”). It may or may not be blue.

We think “it” is a one-man bouncy castle. It’s the only thing that meets all the requirements.

Darling.

So if you want to win a $100,000 contract with Cover Girl cosmetics, the thing to do is visit a company specialising in industrial rubber and get them to make you a bouncy castle big enough for Miss J Alexander but not so big that you can’t carry it. Remember to tell everyone not to wear high heels.

My last day of work before the New Year’s break had Munky emailing me to inform me that my birthday present had been nabbed by customs. My birthday was way back in November, and I knew he was getting me something because he’d told me it was going to be late, so you can imagine that the sense of intrigue was somewhat fierce by this point. Being told that it had failed to get through customs made this even more so.

Shortly after I got home Frood emailed me, subject line: “You can has claws!” I opened said email and found the following message and attachment.

“Didn’t get through postal customs.”

At this point I jumped to an over-excited conclusion. Because the man in the picture is wearing trousers very similar to the ones Frood had been wearing when he left for work and I’d received that mail from Munky explaining that my birthday present had been caught by customs, I figured that Munky had got these for me as a birthday present and sent them to Frood because he works in a postroom, Frood had taken delivery and this was a picture that a colleague had taken on his phone.

I was so excited. I had visions of filling a room full of cardboard boxes painted as ninjas and running around yelling “Meega nala kweesta!” and “Snickt, bub!”

I mailed Frood back immediately, peppering him with questions, no doubt sowing the seeds of confusion. His response:

“No, they are from a news story. They were seized at the international mail hub in Coventry. So you can’t actually have any claws. “

Only, in my now-disappointed excitement, I failed to see the first sentence and fired back another email suggesting that perhaps all we had to do was present ID to the post office and pay the duty charges and we could get them through. Then I grabbed the phone and called Munky.

Me: Hi!
Munky: Hey you! How are you?
Me: Never mind that. What’s this about claws?
Munky: What?
Me: The claws! The claws stuck in customs!
Munky: What?

And then the whole sorry story came out and finally, with Munky gasping for breath in hilarity at how I had been beaten very profoundly with the coincidence stick until I’d grasped the wrong end of it and clung on like a kitten with a catnip mouse, I realised that I could not, in fact, has claws. At all.

Bah.

And I still don’t know what he’s getting me for my birthday.

Frood got me this for Christmas.

Heeee!

I seemed to upset a few people recently by getting worked up about the Beauty and the Bike campaign after it did the rounds on twitter.

Beauty and the Bike, for those of you who either don’t follow cycle campaigning or have an understandable mental blind spot when it comes to anything that’s all mouth and no trousers (pun entirely intended) is a cycle advocacy project that sent a bunch of teenage girls from Darlington across to Europe in an effort to see why girls over there cycle while British ones don’t.

While I have no problem at all with the basic premise — let’s find out why girls and young women don’t cycle and try to do something about it — I have a few issues with the apparent focus of the resulting campaign. Like the Sustrans BikeBelles project, there is an immediate presumption that a major reason why girls don’t cycle is cosmetic:

I cannot be fashionable on a bike.
Answer: On a Dutch bike with a low entrance and a skirtguard, you can even cycle with a long skirt.

As irritating and sexist as I find that (I hope the ladies of SweetPea Bicycles never read it), the bit that annoyed me the most is seen in this quote here:

“Why do British girls stop cycling? By simply asking this basic question, the film reveals the damage that has been done by 50 years of car-centric transport policies. Whilst we fill our lives with debates about risk assessment, cycle helmets, cycle training and marketing strategies to try to persuade people to cycle more, the basic barriers to cycling remain untouched – generous urban planning towards the car, and the resultant poor motorist behaviour towards cyclists. Is it any wonder that most people find cycling unattractive in the UK, but attractive in cycling-friendly towns and cities? It’s the infrastructure, stupid!“

That’s their emphasis. It’s the infrastructure, stupid! So there you are. If you, like me, have been merrily cycling on the road, where you have every right to cycle, and explaining to moronic drivers that they need to learn how to share, that they shouldn’t be passing you so closely your elbow leaves a clean streak on their paint, or yelling at you for being on the road, or any one of the hundred other ways drivers treat cyclists like shit: you were wrong. It’s the infrastructure, stupid!

I’m not particularly keen on re-hashing the various arguments about driver culture and conflict points and engineering: they’ve been done to death elsewhere. I’m not going to detail the studies that show a strip of red paint down the side of the road is counter-productive, leading drivers to give cyclists even less room; nor Ian Walker’s report that women cyclists tend to be given more room anyway. Take a look through a few back issues of CityCycling. In fact, here’s your starter for ten — an article I wrote in response to the Sustrans Bike Belles launch.

It’s all very well having a bunch of teenage girls say “We want more cycle lanes!” Unfortunately I want doesn’t get. More to the point, paths are not necessary. They’re a placebo, a palliative aimed at making us shut up and giving the impression that the powers that be are doing something to follow through on their promises. It doesn’t address the underlying issue. In fact putting more cycle paths in place is just going to make things worse.

Here’s an example of the typical attitude of someone who is angry about cyclists who don’t use paths, as seen in the comments section of an article about the effect of the new Princes Street tram lines on cyclists:

Between Gilmerton and Dalkeith, Edinburgh and Midlothian council have spent millions of pounds on an off road cycle track, which runs next to the road. Guess what, these cyclists ignore it, and prefer to hold up the traffic by cycling on the main carriageway. Simple solution, get the police to stop every cyclist on this stretch of the road and obtain their details, then get the councils to bill each and every cyclist for the cost of the cycle track. That way, folk like me, are not paying for a cycle track that doesn’t get used, and cyclists are punished for failing to use facilities specifically built for them.

Error compounded by misconception, but clearly showing that providing a cycle path will cause at least a portion of drivers to behave even more negatively to cyclists who continue to exercise their right to use the road.

In contrast, here’s a good pictorial summary of the problems encountered on cycle paths and the reason folks might not want to use them (hope you don’t mind, Anth).

My point is that the current method of asking people who don’t cycle what’s best for cyclists is about as useful as asking a vegan how he would prefer his steak in the belief that will make him start eating meat. Rather than asking girls who don’t cycle why they don’t, how about asking girls who do cycle why they do? The main barrier to cycling isn’t external. The roads do not make it impossible to ride. What to do with your hair is not an insurmountable problem. If this were the case there wouldn’t be anyone out there on the roads at all. The very fact that we already have female cyclists riding on the roads means that the major problem is cultural rather than practical. It’s a mental, not a physical one.

It’s not the infrastructure. It’s the culture. It’s the fuckwit drivers who believe the myth of road tax and treat non-motorised road users as moving obstacles.

And don’t call me stupid.

I have a bizarre and near obsessive relationship with food. I don’t mean necessarily in a way that could be described as a disorder: living with an invisible illness for as long as I have has meant developing a more intimate relationship with my bodily functions than the majority of people might consider to be normal. As much as I try to plan my meals, because the various dietary requirements and restrictions need careful planning, frequently all plans go out of the window as my biochemistry jumps up and down demanding something completely different for no apparent reason. More than once I have been asked if I’m pregnant.

It became clear to me about mid morning, shivering still from the ride in, which was particularly cold and wet, that my body wanted something hot for lunch. Not any old hot thing, either. It wanted — no, demanded — noodles.

“Pot noodle? You are not having pot noodle,” I informed it, quite severely.

Body observed that there are instant style noodle things that do not contain MSG, half a Swiss mountain of salt and the equivalent of a pig in lard.

“Fine. We shall seek out this fabled healthy noodle option.”

I needed to go to JJB for replacement weight-lifting gloves anyway (WHY are all the girlie ones in “champage” or hot pink?), and so I drove to the retail park down at Hermiston. Having found some men’s gloves in a size small enough to fit (black, thankyouverymuch) I dashed through the rain to Tesco’s next door. Therein I searched the shelves for noodley snacks that I could take back and either heat in the microwave or reconstitute with boiling water, thenceforth to nom upon with my chopsticks.

Pot noodle. Golden Wonder noodle. All manner of ramen-style noodley arrangements, every one of which, when presented to Body, Body sniffed at (literally, apparently able to smell the contents through the wrapping — man, do I get strange looks in supermarkets) and said “Ew!” before demanding, yet again, noodles.

I sighed and went to look at chicken noodle soup. It does, after all, contain noodles.

“But no!” sang the invisible chorus. “You may not have chicken noodle soup for that commits the great sin of mixing PROTEIN with CARBOHYDRATE and you shall become SICK and even, perhaps, VOMIT.”

“Noodles!!!” cried Body.

“OK,” said I, by now somewhat narked and fed up with wandering up and down the aisles of the supermarket. “How about some sort of vegetarian pasta soup? I mean, that’s nearly noodles. Then we don’t have to worry about mixing protein and carbs.”

“Noodles!”

“Well, maybe. But check the ingredients lest there be sin involved.”

And lo. It turned out that all the pasta type soups contained tomatoes, which are banned under the Nightshade Convention of 2009. By now I was ready to give up and go back to the office and starve myself over the course of the afternoon, as all I had at work was miso soup. That’s a meagre 29.5kcal per serving, which is about as much energy as you’d find in a single nosepicking of snot, albeit much tastier.

I plumped, instead, for some butternut squash and sweet potato soup, which contained a little dairy. Dairy is currently bordering on being sinful however I growled at the invisible chorus and told them to shut the fuck up because I was hungry. To placate Body I bought a packet of rice noodles, which we couldn’t eat at the time but they were there to admire and they are wheat-free and gluten free and organic and therefore devoid of objectionable content in any shape or form. Body had its noodles and so stopped behaving like a 3 year old wanting a pet rabbit, even if all it could do was hug them.

There are times when being a slave to one’s mutant biochemistry is a pain
in the arse.

My first ever photocard driving licence arrived in the post today. I’m chuffed to bits. You may well wonder why. After all, I’ve had a licence since I was seventeen, which is long enough ago to have done my motorcycle training when it was just part 1 and part 2. So it’s not the thrill of finally being able to operate a piece of heavy machinery on the public highway.

No. I am excited because this is the first formal identification document I’ve ever had that has a photo of me with the black eye. This one, if you haven’t seen it before. My passport has the eye that nominally looks like an eye, which means I have to swap them out every time I go through airport security (although last time I flew to Ireland I forgot and neither Edinburgh nor Galway security seemed all that fussed).

OK, for everyone else this might not seem like a big deal, but it is for me. I don’t like the so-called “proper” eye. I’d rather not bother with it at all. Sadly I can’t get away with that because I still have to look professional for the day job and it’s a job involving lots of contact with the public.

Having said that, it’s amazing how many people just don’t notice at all.

Very well, I forgive you. I forgive you because of the sheer joy of sticking one of the annoying Assassin girlies in a cement mixer.

I wanna do that again.

Wolverine: Origins, Uncaged Edition

It’s not usual for me to review a game before I’ve finished it, but I’ll make an exception today because Frood is busy with Quantum of Solace (which is just Mace Griffin with an English accent).

First of all, let’s just do the wibbly-wobbly flashback thing. Imagine everything going a bit blurry like the teleporter effect from Blake’s Seven. You still with me?

Back in 2003 Marvel and Activision released Wolverine’s Revenge to coincide with the release of the second X-Men film — a blatant bit of Wolverine publicity if ever there was one, which made Magneto’s comment to Logan (“Once again, you think it’s all about you.”) even more lulz-worthy.

As it happened, this was a great game. It really was. The stealth kills and smell-o-vision were very well done, and made sense in terms of characterisation. I really enjoyed this game until it got a bit too frenetic for fun right up at the end. As I’ve said before and probably will do again, Activision do have previous for decent games based on the Marvel universe.

The new Origins game is an 18, so immediately you can tell that there is going to be gore. And there is. Lots of it. Which is kind of groovy. I don’t know about you but I get really ticked off with slicing and dicing and people falling over like rag dolls. If I’m kicking the living shit out of something I want see evidence. This game has it in spades.

It is also of the button mashy school, where chaining comboes means hitting the square button three zillion times before punctuating with triangle. This is, to be fair, reasonably similar to the previous Wolverine game, so I can’t complain about that too much. I just find it difficult to keep track of how many times I’ve pressed the square button when I’m being assaulted by three mutant wendigoes the size of Methodist churches, 10 killer robots and about 50 machine gunners.

You see, this game has decided that “increased difficulty” means “send more goons in to shoot him”. I’m not a huge fan of this. Indeed, it pisses me off to the point where, several times, I have been swearing at the screen, my controller slippery with sweat and my hand cramping as I try to dodge, block, roll, counter and pull off a berserker fury all at the same time while being shot to shit by an entire army of mooks who are all yelling “He’s hurt, he’s hurt, keep up the pressure!” It’s just not fun. It’s merely frustrating.

There are some really weird gaming decisions, too, like the scene in which you have to dodge the bullets from a sniper and fight off the inevitable goons while you are looking at yourself through the sniper’s sights. WTF? It’s hard enough dealing with a squad of machine guns at the best of times, but when you can’t see half of them because there are trees between the sniper who’s trying to kill you and both you and them, it’s impossible.

Which leads me to the dodgy camera angles. The camera appears to have a mind of its own and a sense of humour akin to that of GLaDOS. Why yes, thank you, I do so enjoy trying to fight off one of the stronger bad guys while my view is entirely obstructed by the freakin’ CEILING. Or the FLOOR. When fighting the camera follows Logan around like a slavish puppy, despite the supposed right stick control, so most of the time you’re staring at his arse while some giant robot pounds on him with RPGs you can’t see until they hit you because they’re coming from off-camera. This is unfortunate, because you’re supposed to counter projectiles by hitting them back at the source.

Ah yes. Countering. Hit L2 at just the right time to enable a bullet-time segment where you can hit square and perform a special attack. But “the right time” has to be precise to the millisecond, as far as I can tell. Too soon and he merely blocks, and that’s about as exciting and helpful as a dairy cow in the dressage ring.

The power-up bar in this game is rage, and Logan can accumulate rage by killing things or destroying certain items in the landscape. Once enough rage has been accumulated he has access to his superpowers of claw drill, claw cyclone, claw spin or, my personal favourite, berserker mode. He can tell which ones will give him rage because in this game smell-o-vision is a false-colour heat haze affair in which important things have certain colours. Red things are dangerous, yellow things can be destroyed for rage orbs and green things are useful in some way. Rather than the scent trails of the previous game, which made sense, and allowed you to sneak up on unseen enemies and spit them like a pig, this one has funny colours and sort of a blue breeze that indicates where you should go next. Not that you need to be told where to go next because it’s so linear you can’t even go exploring in the scenery a couple of feet from the path. No wandering about for you!

Yes, once more Activision have given us a game in which the scenery really is only scenery. This means it’s not much of a challenge to pick up the bonus items like the figurines that open up the costumes, which is presumably why you then have to complete a near-impossible bonus challenge in order to unlock said costume. Much as I’d like to unlock said costumes, I’m not sure I have the patience or the thumb stamina to fight a version of the character who has unlimited rage and all the combat reflexes of a highly trained cyborg ninja while mine has enough angry to shout at a used teabag and the reflexes of an asthmatic slug.

The gameplay is, thankfully, more varied than Ultimate Alliance 2, in that there are traps to avoid and jumping tests and the occasional puzzle. You can see where they’ve taken some hints and tips from Prince of Persia. The underlying God of War engine is also fairly obvious in the methods of dispatch for the larger, tougher enemies, especially the mutant wendigoes. These are not bad things. I like a bit of variety in my gameplay, which is why I find it so utterly bizarre and frustrating that they should have given us that and yet their combat difficulty is just throwing more and more and more things at Wolverine so he is forced to spend more time dodging and running around looking for a space to allow his healing factor to kick in before his guts spill out.

Generally the difficulty curve goes like this: start a section with a few standard grunts. Meet a whole bunch of grunts with a few of the special elite grunts who are harder to kill. Find yourself in a room with even more of them, plus some of the bastards that need a special move to kill. Fight until your hand aches. Move into a big, empty room where suddenly some new extra-difficult bad guy turns up and says “HAI!” Kill him and three more turn up and all attack at once. Swear a lot. Finally make it through that only to discover that now you’re fair game for all previous bad guys plus the new extra tough bad guys to throw down on you in vast numbers all at the same time. Rinse and repeat.

Frankly this game makes me go “GRRRRRR!” at the telly almost as much as Logan does on it. This is an adult’s game with childishly repetitive combat.

That said, you know, it’s not all bad. The feral senses could have — and should have — been done a lot better but, if you were a bad guy and had the crazy Canucklehead coming after you, would you send just one or two grunts? No. At the end of the day, if you’ve got Wolverine on your territory you send every man you have, armed to the teeth, and tell them not to stop firing until they run out of bullets or are dead.

And they will, trust me, end up dead. For while there are times when I have been reduced to screaming “FOR FUCK’S SAKE JUST DIE, WILL YOU?!” there is something deeply satisfying about going from a room full of mooks to a room full of dismembered mooks. Especially when, as occasionally happens, Logan moves in the blink of any eye from ripping some guy to shreds to answering his phone as if his mum has just called to ask if he’s coming round for dinner.

Ideally this would have had the stealth and the sneaking of the first Wolverine game combined with the potential for wholesale death and destruction on offer here. I should have been able to choose between sneaking up a scent trail for a silent claw through the gut or the incredibly useful lunge (the lunge is, at least while I’m playing, Wolverine’s primary mode of travel). As it is we have a gore-fest blender of a game with occasional challenges based mostly on being fast enough and pressing the right button at the right time. This isn’t a game you can get through without dying, frequently, unlike MUA2: it’s giving me RSI and blisters and is occasionally chuck-the-controller-at-the-telly frustrating. For all its flaws, however, it hasn’t given me the same sense of shocked betrayal that the film did.

It hasn’t, at least not yet, made me cry. Still, I suppose there’s plenty of time.

I promised you two game reviews yesterday and only delivered one. That was rather naughty of me. Still, you can’t say I short-changed you in the last review. At least I got to it before Ben Croshaw (whose feelings about Web of Shadows match mine exactly).

The other game I wanted to review was Katamari Forever. All together now…

NAAAAAAAA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA, KATAMARI DAMACY!!!!!!

Following on from We ♥ Katamari, there has been a terrible accident in which the King Of All The Cosmos suffered a head injury and lost his memory. Total amnesia. The Prince and all the cousins then build RoboKing to help out but RoboKing is a bit of a klutz and before you know it we’ve lost all the stars. Again. It’s down to you to get rolling and create lots of stars to sort things out before the King does something awful to RoboKing (minus lube, apparently), and to bring back the King’s memories while you’re at it.

Thus there are two main arenas in this version of Katamari. In the RoboKing’s realm are the new games, while in the King’s realm are old levels from the last game, tastefully decked out in black and white to represent forgotten memory until you bring them back to life and colour by rolling them up into your katamari.

What can I say? It’s Katamari. Fundamentally, all Katamari consists of starting small and getting big. As big as possible. No, bigger than that. Call that a katamari? It’s a bit of a thin katamari. We’re disappointed. But there it is. You do know the whole point of katamari is to roll big, don’t you? We did explain that, I’m sure we did.

No updated graphics here, oh no. It’s still the quirky, pastel-shaded realm where everything looks sort of baby-ish and sweet until you realise that all the people trapped in your katamari are screaming in pain and fear and you ask yourself how come the bloodless, apparently painless scrapping of MUA2 gets a PG but this blatant horror is considered suitable for three year-olds. It’s not like they welcome your advance with open arms. People and animals alike flee in terror more convincingly than they flee from Godzilla, FFS. I mean, wouldn’t you? If a 10m wide ball of accumulated stuff that once made up the scenery in your neighbourhood came barrelling towards you down the street, wouldn’t you run screaming? You are, fundamentally, rolling up property and living organisms, which are then turned by your mentally unstable, despotic leader into giant fiery balls of nuclear processing using some sort of matter-transforming superpower. It’s not like the people can expect anything but a terrible, suffocating, agonising death.

And they think this is suitable for three year-olds. Right.

The two new things are the Prince Jump, in which you can cause the katamari to leap in the air by using the Six Axis controller’s motion sensor (or pressing R2, which is much easier); and the heart points, which cause your katamari to suck in everything it is capable of picking up. Thus the games can be quite tactical, in that you have to decide whether to go for the heart early, or wait until you’re a lot bigger and can suck in more things. There is also an option to take photos from the Look screens, although I keep forgetting I have the option of an aerial view to look for more things to roll up so I haven’t taken any photos yet.

New levels open up upon completion of previous ones, and you have to complete levels in both realms to open up all of them. You can’t work your way through the RoboKing levels without opening up the King levels and vice versa. Yes, the Cow Bear level is one of those that you have to complete. Grrr. Gnash. Gah. And the campfire one.

Initially somewhat disappointing, the game gets a lot more fun upon completion, when you gain access to the mini games and can then go through the levels again opening up the other modes of play: Eternal (no time limit), Drive (double speed katamari); and Classic (exactly what it sounds like). The music isn’t as good as the previous games, despite consisting largely of remixes of the old favourites.

Overall it is worth a punt, especially if you are already a fan. If you are not already a Katamari fan I’d suggest getting a copy of the previous game instead, because the dialogue is a lot more quirky and you’ll miss out on all the in-jokes in this one, if it were not for the case that it’s become collectible and costs almost as much as this one. The game is definitely worth the current price tag if you already know you can lose yourself to the joys of rolling up screaming people and rabbits, cats, dogs, mice, juggling monkeys, giant octopus, fairies, sumo wrestlers, buildings, trees, flying whales, pizzas, sushi, cars, vans, helicopters, parascenders, Easter Island heads, UFOs, clouds, tropical storms, continental plates and god.

Otherwise, wait until the price drops a bit or find a friend who already has a copy. Just don’t expect to be allowed to borrow it.

Naaaaaa na na na na na na na, katamari damacy…

I’ve got a couple of game reviews for you today. To start with, let’s take a look at Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2.

Do I need to repeat the whole Marvel Fan Girl thing? Yes? No? Tell you what, take a look at my Marvel games collection:

Yes. There are two versions of the original Ultimate Alliance. One for PS2 and one for PS3. Guess what. I liked it. A lot.

I mean, there are some real turkeys there. The Official X-Men game at the bottom left is a pile of shite. I can’t put that any more kindly. It is dreadful. Rise of the Imperfects isn’t really any better, but it’s made by EA so I was rather dubious before I bought it.

Y’see, my experience is that Activision are the guys who know how to make good Marvel games. One of my favourite games ever is X-Men: Wolverine’s Revenge, in which the smelly, short, hairy, bad-tempered Canucklehead takes a trip up to Alkali Lake and stealth kills his way most righteously through thousands of mooks and some super villains. Apart from the end level it’s a corker of a game. The end just gets a bit button-mashy frenetic for my tastes.

The series of co-op games that started with X-Men Legends has always been top of our list for acquisition because Frood and I enjoyed the first one so much. It was our first proper co-op game in which we got to beat the crap out of things together. We’ve bought each one since then and, with every iteration, Activision has seen fit to simplify the game and introduce more characters and yet make them more similar.

X-Men Legends had very customisable characters and your choice of spending your XP was very flexible. If you decided you liked one power over another you could preferentially load that one up and ignore the one you didn’t like. You could buy points for a power. You could assign those powers to different buttons. More to the point, the unlockable extreme powers were for each character. There were different items of kit that each character could wear, affecting their abilities and their resistances. It was possible (at least for Frood) to spend almost as much time playing with character levelling as it was fighting bad guys.

Rise of Apocalypse simplified the character levelling, but not so much that we were complaining. It made it less fun but it didn’t stop that aspect of the game being worth spending time on.

The first Ultimate Alliance simplified by a whole order of magnitude. If I were being unkind I might suggest that this was a direct reflection of Jemas’s rather hubris-filled statement that the Ultimates was there to bring success where all the regular Marvel story arcs were falling into a pit of failure constructed out of what-ifs and untold stories (see the statement at the end of The Tomorrow People). Personally, having read nearly all of the Ultimate X-Men, I can’t help but note that the fifteen-year olds who started out in that grew up pretty damn fast, and feel this is unsurprising because, unless you are going to deal realistically with what happens psychologically to child-soldiers, you can’t have child killers at all. Hormonal teenagers running around snogging one minute and slaughtering baddies the next with nary a blink is entirely implausible.

What I’m trying to say is that, for me, the amount of death and destruction in the Marvel Universe, the darkness of characters like Wolverine (epitomised in the Barry Windsor Smith one-shot) and Emma Frost (femme fatale indeed) is too adult on many levels for the sort of “X-Men as teenagers reboot” that the Ultimates tried to provide to be plausible.

Which is only slightly out of context, because it seems to me that the simplification of the Ultimate Alliance games is a direct result of a rather similar attempt to appeal to a more mass or younger audience whereas the early ones were aimed at fans. This despite the fact that the younger players would probably be happier dealing with complex gameplay than a lot of us more — ahem — mature players.

Other than the irritating simplification of character levelling, the gameplay itself has become incredibly linear. Incredibly linear. Do not show me an open door if I can’t enter that room because there’s an invisible barrier of code in the way. I want scenery, not set-dressing. Given the obviously upgraded graphics — the reflections on Iron Man’s suit are glorious — why can’t we have game arenas confined by the walls rather than inevitable plot? We had that in the previous games. Why not this one? If there’s a rooftop I can see and I have a flier, I should be able to go there. While I’m at it, as we have such gorgeous reflections on Iron Man’s suit, why in the hell do the others all look like they’re made out of plasticine?

Where previous games had levels that required certain characters (Ice Man for putting out fires, or fliers for retrieving objects), we merrily hacked, slashed and slaughtered our way through this one without any real thought for character choice. It makes no difference. Gone are the individual extreme powers in favour of this ridiculous “fusion” notion. They claim more than 200 different powers, but really there are only about five, as we discovered by taking every team combination we could through the basic training simulator before we got bored seeing the same thing over and over again. Playing Wolverine and Deadpool to Frood’s Spiderman and Jean Grey (he’s missing Toad and Blade, bless him), we could either suck everyone into a pile and whale on them; get Wolverine to run around in a very homoerotic fashion holding hands with someone else; or have someone pick Wolvie up and chuck him at the bad guy. If you’ve got someone who has beamy powers, including Storm’s lightning, you can add to this a sort of laser-death ray sort of affair.

For true entertainment, though, Susan Storm putting a hamster ball force field around the Thing is worth a shot.

Gone, too, are the individual boosts provided by cunning outfits of gloves and hats and things. Instead we have three slots for team boosts, each of which provides a power like an extra 15% stamina or resistance to fire. These apply to the whole team, not individual members. Rubbish. Just rubbish. You might as well pick three you like and forget about it.

Each level takes an absolute age to load, this being because all the cut scenes are pre-loaded. This is not for your convenience, oh no. This is so, when you inadvertently reach the boundary condition at the end of a segment, the cut scene can whisk you away before you’ve finished smashing all the crates and looking for secrets. Frood and I both swore at the screen a lot over this. We haven’t got all the collectibles. Some of them we haven’t found. Some of them we couldn’t pick up because the cut scene interrupted. On one notable occasion we went from a sewer in Latveria to a boat in New York two weeks later in the space of a second. I mean. What the hell, Activision?

Seriously. WHAT THE HELL, ACTIVISION? What gaming company lets the cut scene stop the players from destroying crates?

Plus points. Let’s find some. Doesn’t take long to play through the first time? Hardly a plus point. The graphics are great. Really they are. The dialogue in-game is pretty good, and the conversations in the headquarter sections between maps are written to be pretty well in character. Spiderman and Deadpool get some great lines. The Civil/Secret War storyline is nice, in that it reflects material that has been going on in continuity, although it’s material that I mostly haven’t read because I don’t have the six-figure income needed to keep up with everything these days (mind you, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Iron Man Nick Fury sent to Latveria, at least not in the Bendis/Del’Otto version). Captain America is voiced by a guy who is apparently trying to sound like Steve Austin, and he looks quite a lot like Steve Austin, so a point for consistency there. (I’m stretching, aren’t I?)

Dammit. I really wanted to like this game. It’s number 4 in a series of games I still dig out and play sometimes. It’s an Activision Marvel game. It should have been freakin’ awesome.

But it wasn’t. The powers are meh, the fusion powers not spectacular or varied enough, the gameplay is frighteningly — I mean, frighteningly — linear. There is no going back after each segment, and if you thought you could hold off the end and make your way back there’s a cut scene waiting to abduct you. You can save and swap characters wherever you like (in the previous games you could only do this at special check points) but there’s no point because the game only saves to the start of a level and there isn’t any need to swap out characters. You don’t have the option of portalling to a previous section of map from the central hubs so you can go back solo to kick some butt and find missing collectibles while your gameplay partner is busy making dinner.

In short, MUA2 is a disappointing outing for Activision that has got me wanting to go back and play X-Men Legends again. Which is a shame, because we liked it so much and have played it through so often that our characters are now too powerful: the game can’t cope and falls over when we try to play it.

Bah.