MGS4 is a story split into five acts. Here is a brief overview of the plot: While struggling with the effects of a government-developed biological weapon that has left him with less a year to live, grizzled superspy Solid Snake travels the world in a last-ditch attempt to foil the ambitions of his evil – and dead – clone brother, who has re-emerged from the genetic memories locked within his severed arm after it was transplanted onto one of his former henchmen and plans to utilise a stolen supercomputer to hijack the international network of Artificial Intelligences that monitor and control every private military contractor and their equipment on every battlefield around the world. If you think that sounds ridiculous, I don’t think I want to know you.

Even if it’s not the last game in the series, MGS4 is very much the conclusion of the main Metal Gear story. I’d say it’s really not worth playing unless you’ve at least played Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2, and you may as well add Metal Gear Solid 3 to your list anyway since it’s the best in the series. I’m sure the likes of MGS: Portable Ops and Peace Walker are great in their own right, and the old Metal Gear games would help give some context to the relationship between Solid Snake and Big Boss, but for now I’d file them under ‘Further Reading’. If you’re not already up to speed with the series, think very carefully before reading the rest of this review, because I’m going to discuss the four main games with reckless abandon.

Coming out of the Cold War setting of MGS3, adjusting to the battlefield of the near-future felt pretty weird! The nine virtual years since the events of MGS alone seem to have witnessed huge social and technological change. Gene therapy has been supplemented by nanomachines and interpersonal networking, popular media makes light entertainment of the rolling wars being fought by private military companies in the third world, and Snake has started carrying an iPod in his kitbag. It’s a far cry from smuggling cigarettes in his stomach – a weird blend of warfare and consumerism.

That’s really the main theme of the game – war as a commercial exercise; as an industry. Much is said about the “war economy” during the first half of the game, as the PMCs and their proxy wars fuel not just the military-industrial complex, but much of the western world’s economy. As Snake notes in his opening monologue, war has become routine. Speaking as someone who’s been pretty disgusted with Western society’s real-world military endeavours in the last ten years, who’s followed the stories of companies like Blackwater and mercenaries like Simon Mann, it’s a message that really resonates with me. The fictional TV channels shown at the start of the game (a game show and an interview with voice-of-Snake David Hayter, amongst other things) do a lot to show how the endless conflict has been repackaged by the media, permeating all levels of life. (Now that I think I think about it, we’ve seen that before…)

As you would expect, it carries over into the gameplay. Halfway through the first act you bump into an arms dealer who delivers to the battlefield; from that point on you can buy weapons, ammo and other equipment at any time, from the comfort of your Pause menu. Considering that MGS3 was so realistic that you had to hunt and eat jungle wildlife to stave off hunger, this is intensely weird. I actually hated my first visit to the shop menu, until I realised it was all part of the business of war. Of course I can shop online for ammo! Of course I can accessorise my weapons with different grips and scopes! Of course I can trade unwanted guns for store credit! The arms trade is a market like any other, and Snake is just another consumer.

I think my problem with this, as a player, is that there’s a huge range of guns and ammo and accessories on offer, but only two tranquilising weapons: the Mk.2 pistol and the Mosin-Nagant rifle, neither of which have any available accessories. Speaking as someone who plays these games as a militant pacifist, this doesn’t give me a lot to work with. It’s not that I’m jealous – the Mk.2 is a silenced weapon, which is really the only special feature I ever need – but it means I never really needed to engage with the shopping system. I think I bought a job lot of silencers for my M4 rifle during the Raging Raven fight, only to discover that my life was easier if I ignored her drones altogether. Aside from the Mosin-Nagant, my only really big purchase was to fill my pockets with enough tranquiliser ammo to last the whole game.

Similarly, the value of weapons bought and sold fluctuates depending on the current ‘war price’, which sounds like it’s supposed to change depending on how much havoc you cause on the battlefield – how much demand you create for guns and ammo. But again, since I ghosted through with minimal fuss, I never noticed any of this coming into play. Possibly it’s not really as involving as it sounds, and I didn’t miss out on anything? That’s not the point. I really liked the idea of a changing market for violence, but it seems to go against the grain of encouraging stealth and mercy. On the flipside, one of the side-effects of replacing soldiers with synthetic weapon platforms (the Gekkos and Scarabs that become commonplace in acts four and five) is that you can whip out the lethal weapons you’ve been stockpiling and blow them to pieces without ‘killing’ anyone. With serendipitous timing I read an article about the ethics of using robots in war just last week, but as far as this game is concerned I was quite glad for the chance to test out some new guns.

One other thing that I think was really underexplored in the game was Snake’s use of the nanomachine-suppressing syringe. Provided by Naomi during the second act, the syringe becomes an essential tool during the later stages of the game, but since I never had much call for it in-game (I think it restores your Psyche bar, but I managed to keep Snake quite happy without it). As with the consumerist theme, it’s an idea that seem to work much more effectively if the player is crashing about like a bull in a china shop – if I had more of a reason to use the syringe during the game, I wouldn’t have been so blindsided when I had to start using it to solve certain puzzles.

Generally speaking, it seems like a much easier game than MGS3. The fact you don’t have to scavenge for food or items certainly makes life more comfortable, although the urban warzones are so full of discarded equipment that you could probably cope just fine even without hitting the shop. Your Octocamo automatically masks you against your surroundings, which streamlines the slightly tedious process of going in and out of menus to change your appearance, but also means you never experience the joy of finding  a new camouflage – or the pleasurable tension of sneaking into a new area without an appropriate outfit.

There’s a huge quantity of stray bullets and bombs clattering over your head as you crawl around, but once you realise it’s all just atmospheric scripting you stop worrying about it. Because each act lasts only a few hours, there’s no need to eat. Your growling stomach will never give your position away, although instead Snake must content with back pains if he spends too much time hunched over.

In fact, I think Old Snake’s stresses and strains are probably the best new features introduced to the series. The Psyche bar and the stress gauge really bring a new dimension to the action, as you have to monitor Snake’s mood and try to keep his spirits up as he slithers into live fire. There’s something really touching about bunkering down to smoke a cigarette and thumb through an issue of Playboy when times get tough! I can see the logic in presenting a tough-guy action hero like Snake as someone who is perfectly at home with being shot at, but introducing this layer of psychological vulnerability – a reality that soldiers and their commanders must deal with – makes him much more human, much more relatable.

Personally, I felt much more secure here than I did in Tselinoyarsk. I think this is my biggest critcism of the game – it felt too easy. The Beauty & Beast Corps were interesting opponents, but for all their references to boss fights from the previous games they come across as being much less dangerous. Laughing Octopus’s attacks can be nullified by hiding under a bed, Raging Raven and Crying Wolf can’t even see you if you camouflage yourself correctly, and Screaming Mantis represents more of a puzzle than a fight.

The other big thing going on in this game is that all of the ongoing storylines from the series come to an end. Well… most of them, anyway. Really I’d say that this whole game is more about giving fans of the series a satisfying conclusion than anything else, hence my earlier warning that it’s not worth playing without playing the earlier games. Meryl and Johnny get married (I loved the proposal scene), Raiden reclaims control of his life, Snake and Liquid finish their fight, and even Big Boss shows up to offer some paternal wisdom. I’m still a little confused by the way Ocelot seemed to have sacrificed his identity to create his Liquid persona (as Big Boss explains, that ‘hiding within the genetic memory of his arm’ story is too crazy to be true), but it mirrors the way The Boss – his mother – sacrificed herself by defecting to the Soviets as a double agent during the Cold War.

And then there’s the return to Shadow Moses! The whole of act four is spent revisiting the nuclear weapons base where the original MGS was set. I mentioned earlier than I’m halfway through playing the game right now, so its script and structure are very fresh in my mind right now. Without prompting, I did find myself going out of my way to retrace my old footsteps – such as crawling into the tank hangar through the first floor air duct instead of through the now-open front door – and I was rewarded with more cutscenes and flashbacks from Snake’s fading memories.

The base is derelict and falling apart. The old technologies you were once comfortable with – the lifts, PAN keys, and even the nuclear weapons and genome soldiers you were sent in to defeat – have either broken down or been removed, replaced with unnatural, AI-controlled cyborg horrors. A detachment of Scarabs are deployed into the crumbling base to bring it back up to spec for the modern world, much like the way Snake  must be injected with Drebin’s nanomachines in order to use PMC equipment. Two old foes patched up for one last battle, but inescapably obsolete.

I loved the plot of Snake growing old and losing his touch. It reminded me of Unforgiven, in which Clint Eastwood plays a former outlaw who comes out of his quiet retirement to seek the bounty on two violent criminals. There’s one really memorable scene in which Clint and his pals confront one of their targets in a shootout. He shoots the guy repeatedly, but his aim has become so poor over the years that he can’t make a clean kill, so instead he inflicts a really slow and painful death… but old age hasn’t just weakened his sight, but also softened his heart. Once his victim is mortally wounded, Clint calls an end to the fight and instructs the other bandits to take him a drink of water and ease the pain of his final moments. If this show of mercy is lost in the analogy, it’s only because Metal Gear Solid players have been rewarded for minimising their kill count for years now.

To take a step back and look at Metal Gear Solid 4 in its own right, I’m not sure I’d rate it very highly. There’s a lot of excellent rule systems at play, but I think most of the game’s plot would go right over players’ heads if they weren’t Metal Gear veterans. The thing is, if you are a fan of the series – and I am – the second half the game spends hours revisiting all of your favourite memories and giving closure to the interwoven stories of this sprawling series. It is wonderful and I haven’t felt so simultaneously happy and sad since… well, since finishing Metal Gear Solid 3 last year, if we rule out normal human experiences shared with other people.

All that remains to be said is that this doesn’t mean I’m ruling out future games such as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. In fact I’ve become even more excited about it – never mind the electrifying relaunch trailer, I’m more interested in seeing Raiden balance his work against his new family. I’m buzzing with anticipation for the return of the kind of relationship small-talk that drove players insane during Metal Gear Solid 2; hopefully Platinum Games won’t let me down.

Lastly, if anyone tries to tell you that Metal Gear Rising looks silly and over-to-top compared to the ‘serious’ Metal Gear Solid games, please show them this cut-scene from the end of act two, in which Raiden performs exactly the same level of cyborg ninja nonsense:

You’ve been waiting all year, but it’s finally time for another outdated game review! Aside from my brief holiday in the jungles of Tselinoyarsk last Christmas, the only PS2 games I’ve played since God of War were Persona 3 and Final Fantasy XII. They both rumbled on for months and I only got about halfway through them both before getting sick of them and wanting my life back – I kept notes on a kind of time and motion study for FF12, including TWO HOURS spent running through a linear sewer system and fighting no more than three different types of enemy, which I might post at some point as a sort of ‘review’.

Recently I decided to draw a line under all these tedious JRPGs and play something a bit more uptempo. I had another go with God Hand but was rudely beaten down again, with none of my friends offering any kind of useful advice on where I was going wrong – apparently I’m just supposed to endure being bored with frustration until eventually it will just click and suddenly become really good*. I went back to my pile of unplayed games hoping for a more populist, unchallenging experience with Bully, and boy did it deliver!

Bully – officially known in the UK as Canis Canem Edit, although that’s the last time you’ll hear me use that title – is a GTA-style sandboxy misadventure set in a private school. You play as young Jimmy Hopkins, a troubled child who has apparently been expelled from seven different schools already, and who has now been enrolled at Bullworth Academy by his emotionally distant mother who is running off on a twelve-month round-the-world honeymoon cruise with her old and wealthy new husband. None of that backstory really matters though, other than to explain why the school never summon your parents in to discuss your behaviour.

This basically sums up everything that is wrong with Bully. The writing is TERRIBLE. Every single character in the game is a grotesque, shallow stereotype – with the possible exception of your dorm buddy Petey, who rarely escapes portrayal as a milquetoast hanger-on. The Nerds are D&D-obsessed astronomy club members who wear thick-rimmed glasses and struggle with incontinence and impotent rage. The Jocks are steroid-pumping morons who enjoy nothing more than discussing their bodies and sporting activities in inadvertently homoerotic detail. The privileged Preppies, the 50′s throwback Greasers, the ape-like Bullies and the Townie kids who are too unruly to attend the school all fall within their own tight stereotypes.

Even the students who aren’t affiliated with a particular clique come across as monsters, like the fat, dopey girl who the writers use as comic relief, or the younger kids who keep asking you to break into lockers for them (but will dob you in when they see you breaking school rules at other times). The only notable exception are the two ‘unaffiliated’ cheerleaders – sexually submissive Angie and big-boobed uberbabe Christy, who seem to avoid criticism by providing ever-available lips to kiss and bums to pinch (but because they have no position with the story, are completely excluded from the more serious relationships you can form). Among the teaching staff there is a drunk, a bully, a hypocrite, a letch, and a MILF. Your mother is implied to be some kind of gold digger who only takes the time to dump you into a new school each year because your father has long since disappeared. Even Jimmy comes across as a complete asshole for most of the game, often putting everyone down during mission briefing cutscenes only to have a last-minute change of heart and agree to help them out for no particular reason whatsoever!

In fact many of the characters exhibit this bizarre behavioural inconsistency. The game is broken up into five chapters, each of which focuses on a particular school clique. You have relationship stats that reflect your standing with each group – not unlike the gang relationships in GTA2 – but these only seem to change as a result of missions. The outcome is that each chapter seems to start with a cut-scene that shifts your relationships around in the most unlikely fashions, purely to set the scene for the next part of the story. It’s unclear what this relationship even represents. Most of Jimmy’s missions involve helping out people who have been wronged in some way, standing up for the underdog, but each chapter ends with him publicly beating down a clique leader. Jimmy’s rise to power ultimately seems modeled on Ray Winstone’s performance in Scum, his plan being to fight his way to the top of the pile and rule the school through fear and violence. Why, then, does he keep performing ‘Good Samaritan’ acts like recovering the Nerds’ stolen D&D character sheets?! It no sense at all – the same problem as many GTA games suffer from, when they want you to emotionally invest in the protagonist while also trying to justify their violent, amoral behaviour.

The reason I feel moved to write about this game is that, once you get over the bad writing (which means skipping cutscenes and trying not to think too hard about the context of your missions), Bully is actually a really, really great game. I had far more fun pottering around the school and nearby town than I did playing any of the GTA IV games. The system of having classes that you should attend, but can skip, but at the cost of drawing attention from patrolling prefects or policemen, feels like a perfect balance of obligation and choice. The level of granular detail in the game world – like being able to pick a banana out of a fruit bowl, eat it to restore health, then drop the peel in a corridor and watch another student slip on it as they walk between classes – sets a whole new standard for Rockstar, who already impress me in that regard.

Combat is often quite easy – especially if you put some time into learning new moves in gym class, or from the hobo behind the school – but feels really satisfying. I think the game suffers a little as it introduces more ‘gun’ style weapons (the catapult is a given, but I’m not sure about the bottle rocket launcher or the potato cannon), but its barefist brawling system is a lot better than many other games. Possibly I’m just saying that because of all the grappling options but that still counts! Fighting without weapons – and I don’t just mean GTA‘s selection of guns, but also things like God of War‘s intangible blades of wide-area slashing – might not make so much sense outside of the context of playground scuffles, but it feels very tactile and personal, and Bully backs it up with a satisfyingly broad range of throws and strikes. The granular detail I mentioned earlier comes into play in the way you can use all kinds of makeshift weapons and perform ‘environmental’ special moves. For example, you can grab another student, drag them into a toilet cubicle and flush their head in the bowl – certainly a gameplay option that would draw controversy, but undeniably fine attention to detail. The only thing that really breaks the combat is the targeting system, which sometimes makes life hard against one opponent, but often screws you over when fighting in a crowd.

The skateboard, obtained near the start of the game, is an absolute masterstroke. You can summon it out of thin air at any time – assisted by the fact it has its own unique shortcut command (pressing the ‘next item’ and ‘previous item’ buttons at the same time) – and it functions as an alternative movement ‘mode’, allowing you to travel a lot faster over solid surfaces like tarmac. For one thing, this means that you always have the option of running away from an unwanted encounter, if you don’t want to get tied down in a fight. In another sense, I think it creates a really wonderful sense of environmental awareness when you’re trying to get around quickly! I found myself switching back and forth between skateboarding and running, as my network of shortcuts developed (running is faster uphill or on mud, skateboards can go down flights of stairs but can only jump up them if they are below a certain height, etc). You can also ride bikes, which are generally faster than running of skateboarding across all surfaces and situations, but these function more like the cars in GTA – you must find them first, and when you stop riding them you must leave them behind. The skateboard is an inherent part of Jimmy, an alternative form he can take at any time, like a Transformer turning into an ice-cream van**.

As a general rule, I would say that the ‘sandbox’ side of Bully is equally as brilliant as the scripted side is awful. This makes it a strange game to sum up, overall. If – like me – you don’t mind skipping cutscenes and sweeping aside the sexist, inconsistent and relentlessly negative characters, there’s a lot to love about the physical and social mechanics of Jimmy’s day-to-day life! It’s just a shame that you have to endure all those missions and dumb plot twists to gain access to all those toys and tools. I hope they make a sequel, and I hope Dan Houser makes an effort to ensure the script is less tediously cynical.

——

*So that we’re clear, I’ve no doubt God Hand is a good game at heart, I just think it does a terrible job of explaining itself to new players. If you’re going to design a deliberately unfriendly user experience, you have nobody to blame when nobody buys your game.

**This metaphor was originally going to be “Like a Batteroid turning into a GERWALK” – award yourself a gold star if you prefer that phrasing.

Over on DarkZero – aside from co-hosting our recent LISTENER-GUEST SPECIAL PODCAST – I’ve written reviews of Space Marine and From Dust and I went to i43 and interviewed a bunch of pro gamers but that hasn’t been posted yet. I also made some notes about my experiences of the event, which I’ll try and write up sometime this week.

Next: My favourite bubblepipe smoking dog Dog of Flame and I have been playing through Pokémon Red and Blue and writing adorable letters to each other about our experiences – read the (frequently not work-safe) prologue, parts one, two and three over in the desolate remains of the former metal review site Demon Pigeon. It’s all kinds of jokes rolled up into one, but also happens to be emerging as a genuinely excellent analysis of why those first games were so excellent.

Also I made a game for Klik of the Month Klub 50 and worked on a game for Ludum Dare 21, but didn’t finish it. I kept a development diary over that weekend, which will hopefully be posted later today!

Somewhere in all this I’m going to find the time to go to the Eurogamer Expo next weekend and record at least one more podcast and do an absolute ton of other stuff. I am a machine.

Seen this?

“An art installation plus social experiment, PAINTING WITH PIXELS is a tribute to the perseverance of the pixel through several decades of gaming culture. Despite polygons prevailing in this modern area, the geometric prowess of the pixel is still one of intrigue and luster. Each conference attendee was gifted a single pixel (exactly 2×2 inches) to contrinute to a 20-by-8-foot pop portrait by famed designer Jude Buffum (judebuffum.com). Through the course of the convention’s week long run, the large-scale image revealed itself (all 5,760 pixels of it), illustrating the true power of collaboration.”

‘Power of collaboration’ my entire arse.

Every GDC attendee was given a 2″ square piece of coloured card with scrap of velcro fixed to the back, and instructions to stick it on a wall marked with a grid of letters. Each letter corresponded to a particular colour, making the whole thing a painting-by-numbers exercise. They call that collaboration? I call it obedience.

I’m particularly surprised that they would try to get away with this kind of bullshit at GDC, which is a global gathering point for people whose jobs deal with concepts like collaboration and creativity on a daily basis. Absolutely everyone I spoke to about this agreed that the whole concept was a complete misfire. Some wags deliberately placed their pixels in the wrong place, or wrote messages on their pixels, in an attempt to rectify the situation.

But no, the best part was that, towards the end of the week, I noticed people coming forward with handfuls of pixels and slapping a few dozen down across the board. When they were done, they walked across the hall and sat down at… the Painting by Pixels table. To make up for the fact that not enough people could be bothered to take part, the artists were coming out every few hours and expanding the picture a little. I think they even removed a lot of the misplaced pixels, to protect the planned image.

Needless to say it was finished on time during the final day and looked just as it did in Jude Buffam’s sketchbook. So there you have it: The true power of collaboration is doing what you’re told while the empowered elite lie to you. Hand me my bongos.

Snake Eater is basically two intertwined stories. The main plot is a Cold War story about a CIA agent on a covert mission to prevent a Russian colonel from using a prototype superweapon to stage a coup d’etat and trump the US in the nuclear arms race; along the way he fights a series of bosses with strange weapons and abilities, blows up a giant supertank, confronts the spirits of his victims in the afterlife, climbs a really long ladder and eats his weight in snakes. The sub-plot is basically about a young man growing up and crawling out from under his mother’s wing. On that note, the first six minutes of this video introduces The Boss, who in the space of the week became one of my favourite game characters of all time:

The Boss – not Snake’s mother, but a badass mother figure – gives you lots of helpful advice on jungle warfare and survival techniques during the prologue mission, but then shows up during your escape to kick your ass, throw you off a bridge, kidnap the scientist you were sent to rescue, and defect to the USSR. It puts a strain on your relationship, although she never comes across as being a real threat – at least, it’s clear that she could kill you whenever she felt like it, but she prefers to toss you out of the combat zone and warn you to stay away. The bulk of the game takes place one week later, as Snake returns to the jungle to clean up the mess and put an end to her schemes.

As The Boss says, surviving in the jungle is a lot different to infiltrating buildings. Adapting to these open, organic environments makes the game feel a lot more raw than previous Metal Gear Solid games, but also a lot less rigid. I really struggled to get into Metal Gear Solid 2, and a big part of that was due to the camera controls – in every new building you enter, the radar is unavailable until you download a floorplan from a computer console, so until you find the console you must rely on the fairly static camera angles to scout for patrolling guards and security drones. It’s hard work! Since MGS3 features no radar at all (although some partial radar-like equipment is available – motion detectors, heartbeat sensors, that kind of thing) I was expecting to spend half the game just hiding in tree stumps and looking over my shoulder, but it wasn’t like that at all. At least in the Subsistence version of the game, which comes with a free-floating camera that can be controlled by the right analogue stick, things seemed a lot easier.

Without a radar to monitor guards’ positions, it’s a lot harder to keep track of who is looking in your direction. The payoff is that MGS3 features a camoflage system which means it usually doesn’t matter much where people are looking – with the right concealment, guards won’t notice you even if you’re lying on the ground just a few feet away. Much of my game was spent crawling around in tall grass, where even the most experienced guards would react to me with mere mild curiosity – the five seconds or so it usually takes them to walk over and realise that you are not, in fact, a small shrubbery, gives you ample time to crawl under a rock, shoot them with a tranquiliser or spring to your feet and knock them out with a CQC technique.

More than that, once you’ve played for a few hours and learned a few little tricks, you really start to become one with the jungle. Over the course of the game, it transformed from a hostile environment to an extension of my inventory. It provides food and medical supplies, conceals you from enemies, and contains some surprisingly good weapons – it ALWAYS pays to keep a few live snakes in your bag, since you can use them to scare away guards and clear a difficult path without being seen. Since I was playing through the game without killing anyone, I found these non-lethal natural weapons to be far more useful than the assault rifles I was picking up in store rooms.

I would describe my experience of this game to be a series of boss fights interspersed with stealth puzzles. You usually fight a boss after every five or six sneaking areas, which keeps the action going even on a pacifist playthrough. And while the stealth side of the game was slow and strategic, the boss fights were all pretty amazing.  Mostly you are fighting against the Cobra Unit, a team of freaky super-soldiers led by The Boss, who (apparently) were responsible for winning World War 2… behind the scenes, of course.

The Cobra Unit – Click to englarge
L-R: The Fury, The End, The Boss, The Sorrow, The Fear, The Pain

The Pain is a fat man who can control hornets, and is fought in a cave with a large underground lake – obviously, the trick is to dive under the water to hide from his swarm, and swim around unseen to attack him from behind. The Fear is an agile, lizard-like man with a poisonous crossbow and an invisibility suit, fought in a jungle area full of tripwires and pit traps – his fight mostly revolves around the difficulty of tracking him through the treetops while avoiding the traps on the ground (also there’s a special trick to beating him where you fool him into eating poisonous frogs when he stops to hunt for food during the battle). The Fury’s battle takes place in a pitch-black sewer area, which is gradually transformed into a raging inferno by his flamethrower and jetpack – your aim is to hide in the (shrinking) dark areas while using your nightvision and infra-red goggles to track him as he paces around in search of you. The Sorrow is more of a set-piece than a boss fight… while being tortured, you pass through into the afterlife and must wade through a mangrove swamp while being attacked by the spirits of all the people you’ve killed so far (or not, if you haven’t killed anyone).

The real standout boss from the Cobra Unit is The End, who engages you in a sniper duel deep in the jungle. The fight is spread across three large areas, and is really intense! His camoflage, and the distances at which he will engage you, make him very difficult to see with the naked eye… you must use tools like your infra-red goggles, directional microphone, sonar detector and binoculars to locate him. And while you are peering through your binoculars from behind a tree stump, you are always aware that he is out there somewhere, sweeping his sights across the jungle floor and hunting you like an animal – it’s a shock when the camera suddenly jumps to the view from his sniper scope, with Snake sitting in the crosshairs. Pacifist players have an even harder time in this fight as their only available ranged weapon is their tranquiliser pistol, which means you have to try and sneak up on this expert marksman and attack him at close range. A lot of people think this is a monsterously difficult battle – there are numerous cheats built into the game to make this fight easier, and two ways to avoid it completely – but I really loved it! A real game of cat-and-mouse, putting your camoflage, stealth, hunting and survival skills to the test. I would happily play a game that was based entirely on the gameplay of this fight.

With the exception of The Sorrow, all of the Cobra Unit boss fights seem to share a ‘hunting’ theme – The Pain’s fight involves catching him off-guard while evading his swarm of hornets, defeating The Fear is like fighting off a predator, The Fury must be ambushed from behind, and The End is inteded to be engaged in a long, drawn-out hunting contest. It seems strange to see this same pattern of behaviour (hide, sneak behind and then attack) repeated in so many boss fights, but the different environments and attacks being used mean that each battle feels quite unique. Plus there are other bosses – a few duels against a young Revolver Ocelot, a fist fight against the insidious Colonel Volgin, and the inevitable scene where you face off against his giant tank – but those all feel like part of another game. The one member of the Cobras I haven’t really discussed is The Boss, who rightfully waits for a final showdown at the end of the game:

I loved the fight against The Boss because, for the first time in the game, you feel like you’re fighting an opponent as powerful as you. The final battle takes place in a field of white flowers and you are given ten minutes to defeat her before an airstrike arrives and kills you both, and all the time you are both trying to hunt each other while staying hidden, and using the same kind of CQC techniques to throw each other to the ground and break each other’s bones. It’s clear from the lengthy cutscenes before and after the fight that she doesn’t really want to fight you, and I certainly didn’t want to fight her, but – as she tells you in her introduction at the start of the game – soldiers don’t get to choose their enemies. Even after her defection, she helps you throughout the game – during the torture scene, she helps to spare your life and subtly assists your escape from Volgin’s prison by shooting you in the leg and slipping a fake death pill into the wound. She never seems intent on harming you beyond what is required to prove her loyalty to Volgin.

And yet this is where it ends up. The two of you must fight and one of you must die. Snake must kill The Boss to complete his mission, and she will not go down without a fight. And while all the other Cobras explode after being defeated, she collapses to the ground and demands that you finish her off yourself – that you take responsibility for your actions. There is a moment – 5:30 in that video – where the cut-scene borders disappear and the game waits for the player to press the ‘fire’ button. In the same kind of way that MGS2 is designed to feed you with misinformation until you feel as exploited as Raiden does, I think the intention of MGS3 is to make you so fond of The Boss that it really pains you to kill her, just like Snake. In my case it absolutely worked, again.

Afterwards, it is revealed that her whole defection was planned by the US government as a way to stop Volgin from destabilising the war, and her death at the hands of a US agent was seen as the only way to maintain deniability. Metal Gear canon goes that, about thirty years later, Snake (now known as Big Boss) turns against his masters and starts a war in Africa, trying to establish a country without a government where soldiers aren’t just used as political tools. Clearly, his fight against The Boss is supposed to be the root of that dissatisfaction, and it definitely made me feel a lot more sympathetic to his cause. And the thing is, none of this really has anything to do with the business of tanks and superweapons and the Cold War – for me, all that stuff was just a bit of background flavour, something to do while waiting for the next Cobra to attack. The story of Snake’s relationship with The Boss is much more interesting, and cemented Metal Gear Solid 3‘s status as the best game I’ve played all year. I’m not the kind of sap to start judging games based purely on their stories, but MGS3 is basically an excellent jungle-based stealth game and a series of intense boss fights and an affecting coming-of-age drama, all rolled into one.

So said Epicurus, and in doing so he summarised much of the appeal of traditional videogames. What is the point of playing a game like God of War? You jog down a linear path, solving clearly signposted puzzles and killing waves of repetitive enemies until the story reaches its predictable conclusion. God of War even goes so far as to bend over and moon you with its inevitability, by starting near the end of the story and framing the gameplay as a flashback – a narrative device that was highly praised by critics when Prince of Persia did it two years earlier. The reason why God of War remains an enjoyable play experience isn’t the writing, but the fact that you get to crush giant monsters into a bloody pulp.

It is a game of visual spectacle, of sweeping vistas and impossible architecture, gory pyrotechnics and attention-seeking sexuality. Every stage of Kratos’ marathon run is seamlessly connected, cutting out loading screens and making anyone with a natural sense of direction feel quite dizzy. After leaving an ocean port at the start of chapter two, you can run through the centre of Athens and emerge halfway up a cliff; following the cliff to the left leads you to a large underground sewer (halfway up a stone mountain?) while taking the path to the right leads to a barren desert (a short walk away from the ocean and mountain range and a bustling metropolis???) The geography of the game world is every bit as stark, twisted and impossible as the mythological monsters you are there to exterminate, all of which is intended to make viewers gasp with awe. In my case, I’d say it worked.

Puzzles are typically environmental and rarely challenging; most fall in the “push the statue onto the tile” category, which come with a bar set high by games like A Link to the Past. The more interesting ones involved the unnatural properties of mythological beasts and artefacts, like using a severed gorgon head to petrify enemies on top of pressure switches (so, er, more statue-pushing, essentially) but these are unfortunately rare.

The real meat of the game lies in its combat, a repetitive square-dance where you dodge and block and dodge and block until your enemies are in a certain position or perform their ‘ludicrously open to attack’ animation, and then you mash your favourite combo until they recover and repeat the cycle. Every enemy has a behavioural achillies heel – the only one that isn’t immediately obvious being the wraiths, whose weakness I only discovered by reading the manual – and most of the combat boils down to bringing these tactics together in different ways, depending on your environment and the particular combination of enemies you are fighting. Enemies become stronger and tougher during the course of the game, which is represented visually by a change in skin colouration.

I hope I’m not the only person reminded of Golden Axe at this point.

The real breakout feature of God of War‘s combat is the QTE minigame execution system. Most of the larger enemies drop into a ‘vulnerable’ state when their health is sufficiently low – perhaps dropping to one knee and appearing to nurse a headache – which tells the player that they are ripe for a violent death. Buttons are tapped in sequence, analogue sticks are rotated, eyes are plucked out and heads are twisted free. Again, these lend to the spectacle of the game more than the combat – it feels a little disjointed, like being flipped between Ninja Gaiden and Wario Ware. That aside, it does make the combat a lot more interesting to look at, and provides brief pauses in which to catch your breath. I particularly liked how executing certain enemies provides certain bonuses (minotaurs restore health, gorgons restore magic power, etc), which adds another tactical layer to combat – deciding the order in which to kill your enemies, in order to make the most of their execution bonii.

The action really comes to a head in its colossal boss encounters, such as the hydra at the end of the prologue stage. These stunningly violent showcase battles tend to follow standard patterns of dodging and counterattacking, mixed with QTE scenes where Kratos will shoot his opponent in the heart with a ballista, or impale one of their heads on a broken mast. This is one area where the game feels lacking – many stages end with a simple, protracted brawl against waves of standard enemies, and you feel like you’ve been cheated out of a boss. I massively underused my special attacks and magic powers during these fights, because I always expected a raging demigod to show up afterwards and end the stage with a bang.

I’d also like to highlight the final boss battle as being particularly badly designed. He’s extremely powerful – which is fine, for a final boss – but what makes the fight unfair is that in the preceding cutscene you are stripped of all your weapons and handed a new sword, which comes with a whole new set of attacks that you have no experience with. The whole control system seems to change during the final fight, with no warning and no opportunity to practice! I had to stop and ask GameFAQs for advice, which rather ruined the experience.

God of War is a pretty good game, it’s just not very inspiring. The combat is challenging through repetitive, but mainly I found the visual design to be interesting enough to keep me ploughing through. If you like pushing buttons on a joypad to make a virtual representation of a man attack virtual representations of mythical creatures and mechanically reduce their health stat below the threshold required to trigger their death animation, then you will love this.

The party is stripped right down to three characters – bubbly thief Rikku, skeptical swordfighter Paine, and wistful heroine Yuna. All three girls are available from the start of the game, following an opening sequence that resembles a James Bond title sequence set to a JPop soundtrack. All three girls can train in any job that the player has collected (although, disappointingly, outside of the battle the game always shows them in their ‘official’ job outfits, shown above).

With such a small group, you get a very strong feeling for how the girls relate to each other. Rikku and Yuna are old friends from their FFX days, and they spend a lot of time talking about their former associates. Paine is the outsider of the group, but she’s comfortable with that – she’s focused on the job, and has no interest in discussing her personal life, or her past. Rikku is quite happy-go-lucky and often tries to persuade Yuna to live dangerously and act like a hero, while Paine is objective and pragmatic, always turning conversations back to the mission at hand. Most of the emotional development in the game is therefore provided by Yuna, who often finds herself caught between her two friends.

FFX told the story of Yuna’s early life as the High Summoner, a sort of Dalai Lama figure who was expected to save the world from total destruction. The game charted her pilgrimage across the world of Spira, from her seaside village on Besaid Island to the ancient ruined city of Zanarkand – if you look at a map of the game world, you can probably see that the game is geographically quite linear. Her whole life was laid out in front of her – almost literally, in a straight line.

In FFX-2 Yuna has already saved the world, escaped the life of the High Summoner, and is now a young woman who is free to choose her own destiny. Her life has become a lot less certain, and it shows in the way that everyone she meets expects different things from her. When monsters attack, the people of Spira expect the High Summoner to drop out of the sky and save them; When treasure is detected, her captain expects her to go forth and steal it; When a concert promoter loses workers and equipment in a bandit raid, Yuna is asked to do everything from selling tickets to performing as the headline act.

But what does Yuna want? As she comes to terms with her newfound independence, she spends much of the game pondering this question – particularly with regard to her relationship with Tidus, the now-dead protagonist of FFX. Cutscenes throughout the game are narrated by Yuna’s internal monologue as she has one-sided conversations with her dead lover:

“So many things seem intertwined. But nothing leads to you. Why be a sphere hunter if what I’m hunting for can never be found?”

Listening to her private thoughts makes you feel like you’re peeking into her diary – it contributes to the game’s sense of intimacy. She loves Tidus… loved Tidus… but should she hold on to her feelings and continue to search for him, or get over her loss and move on? Her predicament is mirrored in that of the game’s antagonist, a hunky young Blitzball player called Shuyin who, as it happens, died 1,000 years ago. Shuyin and his lover Lenne have a lot in common with Tidus and Yuna, not least their physical appearances. They were killed together at the height of a great war, but Shuyin’s spirit refused to pass on to the afterlife without Lenne – his ghost has spent a millennium wallowing in rage and sorrow, and has now returned to exact his revenge by destroying the world.

Shuyin clearly represents the dangers that Yuna faces if she continues to cling to the past, refusing to accept that Tidus is dead. If there is an antithetical character in the game, it is probably Wakka – Yuna’s childhood friend, who during the course of the game comes to terms with his brother’s death and vows to be a good father to his newborn son. It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that the ‘good’ ending of FFX-2 involves Yuna saying goodbye to Tidus’ ghost and looking ahead to a future without him.

The problem I have is that there’s a special ‘perfect’ ending where Tidus is brought back from the dead and they are reunited. I know I’m being a real killjoy here, but this magical fairytale romance ending really put me off! After 40 hours following a story that is all about letting go of the past and moving on with your life, your ultimate reward is to have that message swept out the window. Sometimes, if you want it badly enough, dead people can come back to life! You can turn back the clock on your relationship and start over! It’s shameful fanservice fluff that undermines the entire game in my opinion.

That aside, I enjoyed it. I did have issues with some of the FF traditions they failed to cut – level grinding, occasional bosses with ludicrously unfair abilities, secret equipment that reduces the game to trivial effort – but there’s a lot of stuff I really loved. The side-quests are a lot of fun, and all have their own special briefing and debriefing scenes that go beyond the usual conversation-in-a-pub that normally take place. The girls are a likeable bunch, and the supporting cast are just the right amount of quirky (the weakest characters seem to be the NPC hangers-on from FFX, who only seem to exist in order to wrap up their loose ends from the previous game).

The thing that I’m realling coming away from this game with is that it feels very feminine. Not just because of the all-female cast, but the way all of the stories are about negotiation, making actual decisions, and changing relationships – not just ploughing through a linear course of action and imposing your will onto the world. Plus it spends a lot more time than most games talking openly about feelings and relationships and stuff, mostly from Yuna’s point of view but also from characters like Lulu (the mother of Wakka’s child, who wonders what kind of father he will turn out to be) and Dona (a former summoner who has fallen out with her repressed admirer Barthello). In FFX-2, Square-Enix have done a good job of portraying female perspectives without falling back on dumb stereotypes (much).

Currently I’m putting out three or four new microgames a week, usually while stretched out in front of the TV. Some of my ‘projects’ have taken a few days to complete – I tend to spend a long time fiddling with sprites, so animation can take a long time – but generally I can go from having an idea to shipping the game to my friends in about 90 minutes. And even that feels like quite a long time, under the circumstances.

I think anyone who is at all interested in game design or production should play this game! One of the most repeated comments about the Wario Ware Inc. series is that it dismantles the gameplay sequences of normal games (eg. jump on the koopa troopa and then dodge a fireball and then collect the coins) and spits them out as individual gameplay events (eg. GAME 1: Jump on a koopa troopa, GAME 2: Dodge a fireball, GAME 3: Collect the coins). Wario DIY basically does the same thing with regard to game design! Instead of thinking about the big picture (which I think most people tend to do), it grabs you by the collar and forces you to focus on these individual moments of gameplay and screams in your ear “IS THIS FUN?!”

Unfortunately I think this game is going to vanish from public awareness pretty quickly, and will probably end up as a sort of insider club for dedicated enthusiasts. There are two things wrong with Wario DIY.

First: FRIEND CODES! These have been the biggest speed bump on Nintendo’s online service ever since they were first implemented. It’s not too difficult to register a set of codes, but it is a pain to have unique codes for EVERY SINGLE GAME, but the real reason they screw up Wario DIY is that they SEVERELY restrict the sharing of games. Other content-sharing games (eg. Little Big Planet) have online databases that anyone can access, giving every player access to millions of man-hours worth of content. I would LOVE to be able to browse through all the random junk that other players are making, but because of Nintendo’s child-friendly online policy I can only share games with a couple of my friends. It’s so patronising to treat adult customers like fragile little children!

Second: Nintendo barely seem to be advertising the game! I only became aware of its existance after reading dessgeega’s blog post about it. Part of me thinks that they could even want to sweep it under the rug a little, since it’s such a ‘game for gamers’ – it certainly doesn’t fit into their “IF YOU LIKE PROFESSOR LAYTON THEN YOU’LL LOVE THE LEGEND OF ZELDA” advertising nonsense¹. Poking around, it turns out they talked about it at E3 last year… now I’ve seen the video, I do have vague memories of getting excited about it with my friends, but in the 11 months between then and the release date I haven’t heard a peep.

I can’t very easily show off any of the games I’ve made on here (although I have seen ‘microgame management’ tools that can be used to edit roms of Wario DIY and hence trade microgames via PC), but one other thing I would like to mention is adult content.

I design my games according to a few simple principles. I’ll write more about it later someday, but basically I start with a gameplay hook, keep the graphics simple, and then throw in some special effects whenever the player does anything. My natural inclination is to keep everything family-friendly, because there’s enough sex and violence in games already. I think it’s an interesting design exercise to look at the games you are playing, identify the violent content (eg. jumping on a koopa troopa, dodging a fireball, possibly even collecting coins if you consider it forceful misappropriation) and then think of ways the gameplay could be recontextualised to remove the violence (eg. jumping on a trampoline, dodging a wedding bouquet, collecting litter… although even these could probably be construed as violent if you thought about it long enough – why are you dodging a bouquet? Will you be FORCED to get married if you catch it?).

Anyway, a few days ago I decided to throw all that out the window and try making a game that was needlessly violent and shocking. Big game companies do it all the time, so I think it was a justifiable experiment. In my game, the player is presented with a close-up view of a woman’s exposed chest, and must tap on her breasts to create a series of cuts around her nipples. When each breast has a full circle of cuts, the game is won and the player is given a ‘reward’ animation in which a hand sweeps across the screen and removes the nipples, leaving a bloody mess. EDGY!

Now that I’ve finished the game and sent it out to a select group of my friends, I have to say the whole experience has left me feeling a bit depressed. I’ve read a few reports about how some Rockstar employees felt really uncomfortable about making Manhunt, and I can sympathise with them (although obviously my game is on a totally different scale). I deliberately pushed myself to make a game about sexual violence against women because it’s pretty much the last thing I would normally want to do, and I’ve learned that… I should trust my instincts!

This kind of thing is a good example of why Wario DIY is great. It’s amazing how much insight into game design you can get from these squiggly little four-second microgames. I just wish they’d open it up to the public, so it could spark off a global ‘conversation’ about gameplay, and give people some hands-on experience of how and why games are made.

Oh, and in case you’re thinking “Clearly they need friend codes to prevent children from stumbling upon sick filth like your breast-slicing game!”, I’d like to add that it’s because of the restricted content sharing that I felt ‘safe’ to publish the game. I wouldn’t have released it it if I thought it would be widely available (which is still a possibility I suppose, in the unlikely event that it goes viral).

……

¹ Seriously, compare these UK adverts for Ocarina of Time and Spirit Tracks. It’s good that they’ve progressed from denigrating female players to putting them on screen, but why pretend that it’s a casual game? Why do they never show her fighting monsters?! It’s like they still can’t admit that girls enjoy ‘hardcore’ games too. And it totally misrepresents the game, which is bad advertising in my opinion.

There was never any doubt that I would buy Mass Effect 2 as soon as it came out and go absolutely crazy playing it over and over again. The strange thing was that, because Mass Effect is both quite long and highly replayable, I was never particularly bothered about when that day would come – whenever I got the urge to dive back into that universe, I would just start a new game and look for new things to try. Two years on, the sequel appeared almost before I was ready, prompting a last-minute dash to level 60 and that final achievement. I probably could have kept playing for another year before I got bored of it. Still, the sequel is out, and most obsessive fans will have finished it at least twice by now. I myself am currently 70% through my second play-through, wading through ‘Insane’ mode and figuring out all the bare knuckle combat exploits that just aren’t necessary at lower difficulties.

I get the feeling that most of the gameplay changes have been directly shaped by player feedback from the original game. The sequel feels a lot more linear, possibly as a part of the general trend to stop hiding content from players – which was certainly a major element in Mass Effect. Your ultimate objective, outlined at the start of the game, is to travel through a quarantined mass relay into an unexplored region of space and shut down an alien plot to abduct human colonies, and this never really develops much over the course of the game. Most of the plot and intrigue occurs during the 40-odd hours you spend preparing for this final attack – recruiting team members, earning their trust, upgrading your ship, and investigating the aliens responsible for the abduction.

It seems strange that Bioware would build the game around such a straightforward, almost entirely twist-free central plot. One of the best things about the original game was that its modular story would adapt itself around your chosen route through the game – the four main missions each contained a vital piece of information, all of which must be combined in order to locate the Big Bad’s secret base and take the fight to him. In Mass Effect 2 you just seem to fly around the universe ticking off items from a shopping list, with sudden spurts of deus ex machina shunting the story along when you reach certain milestones. It’s a bit disappointing really.

Similarly, the side-missions and planetary exploration gameplay have been streamlined into a much simpler format. I know a lot of people complained about how many hours were spent driving around barren landscapes in the Mako, but I was surprised to find it completely absent in the sequel. The boring, pointless task of surveying mineral deposits now takes place through an equally boring and pointless scanning probe minigame played in orbit, while the planets you can land on have been transformed into linear romps down fenced-off trails. This allows a much greater degree of directive control over the mission and its environment – certainly a big improvement over the featureless moons and identikit warehouses that plagued the original – but you do lose some possibilities for interesting missions, such as on the planet of the space monkeys.

Plot missions are shorter in the sequel, but much greater in number. Most are recruitment missions, which involve going to a city, finding someone who can tell you how to find the person you’re looking for, then travelling to a linear combat area and killing whatever group(s) of people are preventing them from leaving. Each crew member comes with an optional ‘loyalty mission’ that unlocks a new, Cerberus-themed outfit and a unique bonus skill; these usually involve another linear killing spree, then an interesting scene in which your crewmate’s dark secrets are revealed, and then a final conversation where you choose whether or not to allow them to kill some figure from their past. The stories that unfold during these loyalty missions lead to the most interesting moments in the game, which do make up for the repetitive mission structure, but in some cases it leaves you feeling like the combat is an arbitrary chore they wedged into the mission just to swallow up your time and effort, so that it feels like more of an achievement when you reach the end.

All of this sounds a bit bleak and boring, but the bulk of Mass Effect 2‘s gameplay is a great improvement over its predecessor. The bloated inventory system has been almost entirely removed and replaced with an armour customisation system that is brilliantly designed but slightly underwhelming in terms of options. The skill system has been simplified, although the range of skills available has greatly increased. The biggest improvements are found in combat, where weapons and skills now enjoy varying efficacy against health, armour, shields and biotic barriers. ‘Thermal clips’ restrict how much ammo you can carry, invariably not quite as much as you’d like to, which encourages you to switch between weapons and vary your strategies much more.

It’s just a shame that they couldn’t make these improvements without delivering a such a weakened narrative. One of Mass Effect 2‘s talking points is that anyone and everyone in your crew, including your character, can be permanently killed at certain points of the game, but most of these deaths feel really random and undeserved – it doesn’t come close to the drama of Mass Effect‘s Virmire mission. The closing cut-scenes include some pretty big hints about what is to come in Mass Effect 3, and it looks brilliant… unfortunately, it comes across as a slap in the face when 10 seconds of CGI is more exciting than the 40 hours of game you have to play through in order to see it.

I suspect that Mass Effect 2 will eventually be remembered as the weak link in the trilogy. It’s a great game, but it feels like filler material – a public playtest of new combat mechanics, in preparation for a show-stopping second sequel.

As sad as it was to hear that the show was ending, Rab’s diatribe about the review treadmill really struck a chord with me. When you make a career out of evaluating games, it’s very easy for play to become a mechanical routine, and this can really damage your sense of fun. I don’t think this problem is confined to professionals, though. Anyone who plays games for some ‘higher purpose’ – even if they’re just posting reviews on a forum, or writing a term paper about class conflict in Frogger – can learn to struggle on through a game they dislike, just because they feel they ought to. Once you become used to this frame of mind, it’s easy to just sink back into it whenever you play anything, and then every game you play just becomes a joyless series of criticisms.

It’s very tempting at this point to make sneering links to my favourite terrible gaming websites, but that’s pretty much the exact problem. Like Rab, I’ve been thinking back over some of the things I’ve said about games in recent years and I feel like I’ve been incredibly negative about things I’ve liked – I have a long list of complaints about Fable II, but ultimately its flaws are no greater than one of my old-time favourites like The Chaos Engine. This kind of attitude – expecting everything to be perfect and then spewing bile whenever an author’s work doesn’t match your own personal vision, whether it’s a game or a review of a game – is really childish and depressing. I guess we’ll see how well I manage to avoid it when I write up my Lionhead review blowout over the coming weeks.

Anyway, instead of sneering at someone else’s work, I’ll just link to someone else who has. Without grumbling about the technical style of the review, I want to highlight the tone of Pocket Gamer’s review of Dinosaur King for the DS. I read this recently – for a ‘higher purpose’, of course – and was struck by the reviewer’s complete lack of respect for the game. It’s pretty clear that the he doesn’t expect anyone to read his review – as a Japanese-only game aimed at young children, it has a very limited audience in the UK – and so he just goes off on a series of tangental rants, ragging on the simple combat system and generic storyline and repeatedly pointing out that it’s not as good as Pokémon. But so what?! It’s a kid’s game – of course the combat system is simple! Would he blast Love & Berry for not having online multiplayer?

This reminded me of another story I heard recently, about Stuart Campbell giving Socket: Time Dominator 0% in Sega Zone, years ago. He later explained it thusly:

“In its own right it wasn’t the worst game in the world by any means, but it was so completely ripped off from Sonic, yet so inferior, that there was literally no point in ever buying it rather than a proper Sonic game. Therefore, in the sense that reviews are a buyer’s guide, it deserved 0%.”

It’s a hugely arrogant thing to say, and pretty illogical if you ask me – he of all people should understand that people generally buy more than one game in their life, and there’s a good chance that any Mega Drive owner looking for a cute platform game probably already have the Sonic games in mind. That said, the review was written over a decade ago, so I’m not exactly fuming with rage about it. The important thing is that a lot of reviewers – including myself, on occasion – still seem to think along these lines, and I think it’s a really bad attitude that doesn’t help anybody.