It is terribly tempting to continue talking about games that have few redeeming qualities other than cute girls with glasses, but I do occasionally break out of my rut and play something that, well, you could have out on the coffee table with your mum over and not feel too embarrassed about.

That’s not to say that the internet hasn’t done horrible horrible things to Valve’s creation.  It does, after all, feature a female lead, and a google image search of “portal 2 rule 34″ shows that some people have devoted significant time and thought to the more salacious possibilities of portals.

I did have to look up how to spell “salacious”, but it turned out that I’d gotten it right the first time.  Of course, the only reason I know the word at all is that it was the name, or part of the name, of Jabba’s pet in “Return of the Jedi”.  I don’t have a word of the day calendar or anything.

I do have a birthday coming up soon, but calendars aren’t traditional June gifts.

Where was I?

Oh, yes, Portal 2.  The original Portal was the second-best game of 2007, the top spot being occupied by Brave Story: New Traveler, an assertion which I make knowing full well that it will draw the ire of anyone who actually reads this, though of course I don’t really have many readers and thus I should be fairly safe.  It was, and here we’re back to Portal, almost an afterthought, stuck into the Orange Box with a sort of “look, you’re getting this free with the Half Lifes and the Team Fortress, don’t complain that it’s only 4 hours long”  attitude, and it of course destroyed the internet, becoming a memetic force strong enough to rival cats and cheeseburgers.

Portal 2, being a full-priced game, had to be a bit longer, and it is.  I spent about 10 hours playing through it, and it would have taken me much longer if my wife hadn’t been watching me play and pointing out bits that I’d missed, and I’m happy to report that it is, much like the original, bloody brilliant.  GlaDOS is wonderfully insane, the new characters are great fun, and the puzzling is usually just tricky enough to make you feel terribly satisfied with yourself for getting things right without making you pull your hair out.

That’s an expression, of course; I keep my hair cut with a #1 guide and therefore pulling it out would take tweezers and a great deal of tenacity.

But I digress, again.

I did find myself terribly, terribly frustrated at times during the middle act of the game, which was a combination of a Big Twist and a “hey, here’s a bunch of new mechanics you need to learn”, but that was also the part of the game that was full on fan-service and was somewhat redeemed as a consequence.

Oh, and the final portal of the game – and I will not spoil it here – was the single most “that cannot possibly be the solution, but I’ll try it anyway OH MY GOD” moment I’ve experienced in any game ever.

So, good stuff.

I haven’t played the co-op campaign yet, but I plan to abduct someone and force them to play it with me.  The single player mode sets up the rationale for it pretty nicely, and I’m looking forward to another few hours with GlaDOS.

Portal 2 did have a side nod to Half Life: Episode 2, which was almost cruel of Valve to throw in, and it did have one fleeting mention of cake, but I will forgive them those two things as long as Episode 3 comes out before I turn 40.

You’ve got some time, Valve.

For the record, I did manage 4 weeks straight of daily posts, which is pretty good by my standards. Mind you, my standards are pretty low.

Anyway, Assassin’s Creed and its sequel, which i will refer to collectively as The Ballad of Desmond Miles, represent a surprisingly seductive philosophy of game design that I would like to see more of in future: the premise that your on-screen character is surprisingly competent at what he or she does.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was another good example of this, but that particular game had the advantage of, well, being the goddamned Batman.

To sum up: I’ve played a few games with stealth elements in the last few years, and they’ve all included a “press X to move all stealthy” kind of mechanic.

In TBoDM, on the other hand, you’re playing a sneaky bastard, and the control scheme reflects that – you’re naturally moving in a low-key, blending-in way, and you actually have to push a button which may as well be labeled “break stealth”, because what it does is change you from a mild-mannered good citizen – albeit, a surprisingly well-armed good citizen – into a stabby parkouring Very Bad citizen.

Furthurmore, as a Very Bad citizen, it’s assumed that you’re pretty good at Stabbying Mans in gruesome and occasionally deeply amusing ways, so the process of doing so is reduced to a single button press that represents your desire to do so, which is generally immediately followed by a satisfactory bit of on-screen Stabbying.

The platforming bits of the games also follow this basic philosophy of divorcing the on-screen action from any actual ability on the player’s part. Doing visually amazing parkouring bits in TBoDM is a simple matter of pointing the controller in a direction and holding down the Awesome Moves button.

OK, yes, so it might be a bit dumbed down compared to, say, a Mirror’s Edge or the like, but the end result is that you get to feel pretty damn smug about your sheer awesomeness, even if you’re not directly responsible for most of it.

Now, while the first game was awesome at the stabby and jumpy bits, it was also rather deeply flawed in some ways; the horsey travel bits were fun but repetitive, it was really easy to get lost once you got out of the first town and needed to go to the correct next town to advance the plot, and there were a ton of random little things to collect for no real plot reason.

Oh, and it was pretty hard to feel much empathy for Altair. I mean, it was a game about being an assassin, so maybe empathy wouldn’t be a great thing, but the family elements they added in for Ezio’s story made him a much more interesting character, and gave some actual purpose to the scaling buildings looking for random shiny things.

Oh, and while they did keep SOME horsey bits in for the sequel, actual town-to-town travel was considerably streamlined.

Anyway, I was really impressed by AC2; I’d liked the first game quite a bit and didn’t expect to enjoy the sequel so much more.

Is it wrong at this point to say that I hope Ubisoft doesn’t screw it up?

I’m still going to rank it as my third-favorite, but that’s not exactly a complaint by any stretch.

Next up are Resident Evil : Code Veronica, which will represent my fourth attempt to play a Resident Evil game, and Assassin’s Creed II for more platforming action but with more man stabbying.

I haven’t finished it as of this writing.  I’ve been playing it for a couple of nights, though, and I’ve just gotten the last of my Spiffy Magical Powers so I suspect that another good play session will wrap it up.  At any rate, my impressions of the game are based on only what I’ve seen so far and I reserve the right to get snippy if it ends with a Psychonauts-style difficulty spike.

It’s a really good game and I’m glad they made it.  That’s a bit of a reversal for me because I was quite happy with the 2008 PoP game and wanted to see some resolution to that story’s cliffhanger, but I’m glad that Ubisoft has apparently decided to go back and try to undo some of the mess they made with the previous Sands of Time sequels.

What they gave us this time is a game that’s full of nicely fatal traps and difficult platforming, like Sands of Time, but has the graphics muscle of PoP2008.  It’s a great combination, made better by a combat system that doesn’t suck. As much as I’ve enjoyed playing PoP games in the past, combat has never really been a part of the game that’s any fun, so the button-mashy style freeflowing swordplay in this outing is rather a relief.

Sadly, it doesn’t have a companion character like SoT or PoP2008, so it is rather lacking in the conversation and banter that made both of those games extra fun to play.  There’s a couple of other characters in the game, excluding the Prince himself, but they really don’t do much tossing one-liners back and forth.

Oh, and it doesn’t seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the film, though its release was certainly timed to take advantage of the film’s release.  That’s a pretty big plus – I don’t have anything against movie adaptations done well, but there’s always the risk of getting a bad one, and there’s not much more painful than a bad movie adaptation.

Oh, there’s a weird little Ubisoft loyalty program thing called UPlay that’s built into the game; as you play the game you earn points that you can spend on virtual items and unlocks for Ubisoft games.  It seems harmless ENOUGH, but I hope it doesn’t lead us down the Day 1 DLC path that publishers are trying out to discourage used game sales.

For the meantime, though, I’m going to continue with my habit of talking about games that everyone else played through a year ago, in this case the latest Prince of Persia game and its subsequently-released epilogue level.

The last time the Prince of Persia series got a complete revamp, the result was one of the best games I’ve ever played.  It was atmospheric, funny, suspenseful, and – oh, yeah – right at the top end of my personal difficulty curve.

It was also followed by a sequel that completely destroyed my interest in the series.  Kind of like Tomb Raider II, there.

On the other hand, much like Lara, the prince has gotten another chance at things with a reboot.

Not that it’s the same prince, mind you, or even a prince at all.  He’s actually a thief who specializes in, well, tombs.  So uh, they could have called it “Tomb Raider of Persia”, but that leads to confusion and I guess they figured they’d go with the old name and avoid getting sued for the sake of accuracy.

I played through it last week, and it was, well, probably the prettiest game I’ve ever played.  It’s also pretty damn funny most of the time, though it does occasionally slow down the quips for the sake of occasional dramatic bits, and the prince’s companion Eliza is on the far end of the scale that sidekicks like Yorda are on the other end of.  Nothing against Yorda, mind you, but I can report that I never once felt like knocking off work early and abandoning Elika to shadow monsters.

Oh, and it’s easy.  Super easy.  Seriously.  I mean, it was generally hard to die in Sands of Time, but I wasn’t able to find ANY way to die in the new game.

Not being able to die doesn’t mean that it wasn’t challenging, at times.  The platforming bits do test your reflexes and timing, and you get a deep feeling of accomplishment and reward when you pull off a particularly tricky bit.

So it’s got that going for it, and I highly recommend it.

I’ve seen lots of complaints that it didn’t have a proper ending, and I will admit that the ending it does have is a shameless – TRULY shameless – setup for a sequel.

So when I got to the end, I decided I’d buy the Epilogue levels and give them a run.

I’ve made worse mistakes, but this was still kind of a dumb move.

The Epilogue is 10 bucks, lacks most of the charm of the main game, throws the whole “pretty” motif out the window, and is bloody hard, particularly the combat.  It’s not so much that you do a lot more fighting or that the developers didn’t bother making any new enemy models, it’s that the mindless soldiers you fought so often in the first game gained new abilities, all of which seem to revolve around hitting you through blocks, stun-locking you, and being generally frustrating.

The boss fights, oddly enough, aren’t at all frustrating.  It’s the small fry that are the pains.

Oh, and it ends with a cliffhanger, even more annoying than the original cliffhanger, and there’s no way to make a single sequel that works as a follow-up to the epilogue that will also work as a follow-up to the main game, so I am forced to wonder if they’ll even acknowledge it in future or just try to come up with a compromise.

So to sum up: Buy Prince of Persia, if for some reason you didn’t do so in the last year, play it. enjoy it, and don’t bother with the DLC.

Wait, I did have F-Zero for the N64, and that was hella fun, so I guess I liked one of their franchises.

Anyway, point is, I had never played any of the Star Fox games until a few years ago, and the first one I tried made me really quite vexed.

See, I was in a store that had a Gamecube demo machine set up, and the demo they had running was Star Fox Adventures.  I gave it a try, and quite liked it; the main character was a cute blue fox-girl, you were flying around on a pterodactyl of some sort shooting at a big enemy ship in a manner that reminded me of the Panzer Dragoon games, and then you had a sort of puzzle solving bit where you ran around an ancient temple throwing explosive barrels at stuff and solving puzzles.

I played it for about 10 minutes, just long enough to – and this is the crucial bit – ALMOST finish the first level, and then dropped $50 on my very own copy to take home and play.

See, when you finish the first level, the blue fox-girl character gets trapped in some sort of energy prism thing, and then the REAL game starts, the one where you’re playing as Fox McCloud and his cadre of Annoying Woodland Pals, where the gameplay changes to a Zeldaesque series of fetch quests.  I’ve tried playing this game several times.

I always get to a point – about an hour in – where I have to win a hoverbike race to progress, repeatedly fail, and turn off the machine in disgust.

I still think Rare owes me $50 for that one.  Hey, it can be $45, I am comfortable with the idea that the first level might have been worth $5.

I still, somehow, wound up with a copy of Star Fox Assault.  I think I was in a bit of a state of denial about how much I really disliked Adventures, I was in a “well, someday I’ll get back to it and finish it and then I’ll be glad to have the sequel” sort of mood.

Is it any wonder I have 300+ games in my backlog?

Anyway, I tried Adventures again recently, got to the same point, got stuck, and promptly dropped the game onto my stack of “sell these to Toys B We the next chance I get”

Then I went back to the Gamecube shelf, grabbed Assault, and dropped it on to the same stack.

Then I took it off the stack, and went looking for reviews.  There were plenty, mostly filled with incoherent nerd rage about how awful of a game it was compared to the older Star Fox games and how it was too short and too easy.

I like my games short and easy, and didn’t have any fond memories of earlier games, so I saved it from the “sell this” pile for two days while I finished it.

It was pretty neat.  It still had the Godawful Annoying Woodland Pals problem, but you could skip through their dialogue most of the time and the actual levels consisted of shooting everything in sight, either on foot or in an X-wing Arwing.  The last level was annoying as all get out, inasmuch as you spend most of it flying your X-wing Arwing through narrow tunnels at high speed and then having to fight an Annoying Multi-Stage Boss, but I enjoyed the game as a whole.

I also played through the Beatles: Rock Band story mode, though I really can’t count that as working on my backlog; I was visiting a friend who’d purchased it and there were two guitars handy and one thing lead to another and we wound up playing every single damn song.

I can’t really complain, though, because they had a bunch of pretty good songs, including plenty of songs that I recognized but didn’t realize they’d been the artists on.  My excuse for that is that they apparently switched lead vocalists a lot, and, well, I’ve never owned any of their albums so I didn’t realize that they changed their sound quite often.

My friend, by contrast, has bought every Beatles album approximately eighteen times, knows the history of the band back to front, and was able to quote album name, side, and track number for every track in the game.  To his credit, he was quite patient with me during the whole process; and gave me a name for my pain as it related to certain long guitar solos that I originally blamed on some malevolent and sadistic fiend.

Turns out it was just George Harrison.

Anyway, not a bad game.  45 tracks seems a bit light for $60, but the detail put into the stages and background visuals kind of make up for that; they put a lot of effort into this one and it shows.

I don’t know quite how to describe my feelings on this – on the one hand, I’m really glad that I was able to play through entire chunks of the game, uninterrupted, and as a result had a lot of fun – on the other hand, it still crashed a lot, just not during critical bits, and it’s hard to say good things about a game just because it started crashing when it was more convenient for the player.

I remember hearing several complaints, back when the game came out, that people expected it to be more of a stealth sort of game, where you carefully cased your target, waited for them to be unguarded, and went all stabby on them in the dark of night with no witnesses.

It’s not that sort of game, though.  Even early levels have you fighting a lot more than being stealthy, and the final level, which is basically a running, multistage boss fight, is 100% fighting and no sneaking around or platforming.

That said, I found the action bits to be entirely satisfying, so I wasn’t disappointed when the stealth bits got thrown out the window.

The ending is shameless sequel setup, with your character left more-or-less completely without resolution.  If I’d played the game two years ago, this would vex me.  Since the PSP sequel comes out in a couple of months and picks up right where the first game left off, I’m OK with it.

After that, looking for a change of pace, I took Lost Kingdoms off the Gamecube shelf and gave it a spin.

I wasn’t really paying attention to console games between 2000 and 2003, so I wasn’t around for the Gamecube launch – or for that matter, the PS2 or Xbox launches.  I was still wrapped up in the sort of cocoon that you live in when you’re a MMORPG addict; you are vaguely aware that other things are happening in the world but they don’t seem to matter much.

As a result, I didn’t go through the new-console bipolar syndrome, where you’ve just spent a few hundred bucks on a new box that plays games, only there’s not many games for it, and every new release gets hyped well out of proportion to its actual potential and then winds up disappointing you – and that’s the environment Lost Kingdoms was launched into, as the Gamecube’s “First RPG”, a label which manages to quite completely fail to describe the actual contents of the game disc.

I assumed, when I started it, that it was an RPG first and foremost, though I’d heard that it was “card based” and assumed that there would be some sort of card game based battles.

Turns out, it’s all card game based battles with the lightest veneer of RPG painted on top of them.  This was a bit of a shock, especially since I’ve never played any console games based on card mechanics and was quite out of my element.  I managed to get my feet under me after about six hours, which was just in time for the game to end.  Yes, it’s really that short.  There are, I am told, some side quests you can do to pad it out, but I wanted to get my kingdom saved.

It’s a weird genre – and I admit that I say this solely based on this one example, which may not be representative of the genre at all.  You’re playing a character – and, let’s give From Software a thumbs up for making it the Princess’s turn to save the kingdom – but you’re as much a spectator as a participant; your role in most battles is to get on to the battlefield, summon up a bunch of monsters, and then run around trying not to die before your monsters can beat the other monsters.

The challenge comes from all this happening in real-time, with no idea what cards you’ll have access to at any moment, making you adapt very quickly to changing circumstances, which I would call a good thing.

On more of a down note, it’s made more complex – and downright frustrating, at times – by the Japanese obsession with elemental strengths and weaknesses, which seemed to ensure that, at any given moment, the four cards I had visible in my hand were precisely the wrong four cards for whatever type of opponent I was facing.

Anyway, despite having to repeat some early levels four or five times because I had the wrong cards or simply ran out of cards before I ran out of opponents, I persevered to the ending, have a vague sense of being a better-rounded person as a result of trying out a new genre, and will probably be much less confused should I try out the sequel, which of course I bought several years ago even though I hadn’t even started the first game.

It’s a brilliant game – I will say this even admitting that some of the intelligence gathering missions are painfully repetitive – because the other parts of the game are so damn fun.

And then there’s the bit where the game is buggier than a farm-house porch lamp on a summer evening.

Let me describe – and to be fair, let me point out that these issues seem confined to the PS3 version, and further to running on early 60GB models – the issue I’m encountering.

Simply put, the game locks in a fascinating way. The game sound doesn’t stop, you can still rotate the camera, in many ways it seems like everything is fine. Except, of course, that your character, and all NPC characters, freezes solid, and the only way to get out of the mess is to cycle power.

I will describe why this is particularly annoying:

The game revolves around several missions wherein you find out about a particularly odious individual, gather information on them, take it to your boss, get the heads-up to stabs him, infiltrate his base, go all stabby stabby, and run back to your boss.

You are subjected, during this, to three unskippable cutscenes.

Should you die at any point… You start over in the phase you died in. It’s actually fairly forgiving.

Should you CRASH, however, you go through the whole damn sequence again, including all the unskippable cutscenes.

I crash, on average, twice per stabby mission, so I’m watching these cutscenes a LOT, and they’re not really that good.

And yet I’m keeping at it, so either it really is quite good or I really am quite the masochistic.

This makes the second big-name PS3 title I’ve played recently that goes randomly into lockup land. I do try to remind myself of all the games I’ve played that don’t, you know, crash randomly, but there are times…

I didn’t actually have “Star Wars” bedsheets.  I had “Battlestar Galactica” bedsheets.  The lunchbox thing, though, Star Wars all the way for me.  My sister? Holly Hobby.

Anyway.

I’m going to put it right up with Dark Forces in my list of “Star Wars games I actually enjoyed playing”, which is high praise considering:

1) The game’s tendency to, if I had an AT-ST and a hunk of rubble directly in front of me, decide that I wanted to unleash the full fury of my force lightning blast into the hunk of rubble while the AT-ST riddled me with blaster fire.

2) The mid-level boss fight I spent stuck in a railing, unable to move, throwing my lightsaber at the boss over and over again until he mercifully used force grip on me and threw me across the room.

3) Needing to repeat the first SEVEN end-level boss fights because, the first time I finished each level, it would crash without first saving my progress.

4) Random crashes throughout the game.  Thankfully the game has lots of checkpoints.  This was the PS3 version, I can’t say if the 360 version is any less frustrating.

5) The goddamn Star Destroyer bit.  On the plus side, this was the first “boss” that wasn’t immediately followed by the game crashing.  I was incredibly relieved by this until I realized that I was happy simply because the game had stopped abusing me.  Call it battered gamer syndrome.

6) The way it throws QTEs at you all the damn time.  Seriously. Having Big Dramatic End-of-Fight sequences is cool – for spectators.  As the poor mook with the controller, your entire attention is on the bottom of the screen, anticipating the next “Press X to not die!” message, with only a vague awareness that Neat Things are happening in the other 80% of the screen.

Those little tiny nitpicks aside… a good ride.  The visceral nature of the force powers you unlock through playing makes being a bad guy a tremendously joyful experience, almost to the point of being disturbing, and the assorted screams, moans, and grunts from your hapless victims really complete the package.  The environments are also 100% fan-service glee, especially the junk planet, which is basically a big game of “Spot-the-Nina” for Star Wars geeks.

I don’t mean to imply that they’re all in one stack, mind you.  It’s more of a stack state of mind.  A metastack, if you will.

Anyway.

I finished up Dynasty Warriors: Gundam on the PS3, which was a game I’d had described to me as “you push X for a long time while you grind through hordes of weak robots, and then occasionally a slightly tougher robot comes out and you push X REALLY fast”

I will take exception with this description.

Having played it, I can now reveal that you spend most of the game pressing the Square button.

Not that you don’t press X.  In fact, since X is “dash”, you usually press X and then press Square a bunch of times.

Anyway, the game has two modes: One (“Official Mode”) in which you play through heavily abbreviated versions of the events of the One Year War, from the original Gundam series, followed by Gundam Z and Gundam ZZ.  In a bit of a twist, you play through them as the heroic characters first, then again as the bad guys, not that moral absolutes ever really apply to Gundam characters anyway.

The second (“Original Mode”) consists of tossing Gundam characters from 25 years of the franchise into a big blender, hitting “chop”, and pouring what comes out into a big glass of confusion.  The game play, revolving mostly around slamming on the Square button until you have to fight a slightly tougher robot, doesn’t differ much from the first mode.

I’m not implying here that I didn’t enjoy the game.  I played through the “Official” mode six times over, after all, to play through all the eras from both viewpoints, and then I played through the “Original” mode one time to see what that was like, and by the end I’d sunk about 20 hours of my life in to it, rather enjoyed it, and felt good about calling it complete and moving on.

I spent a little more time with “The Witcher”, probably 50 or 60 hours.  It’s the first long western-style RPG I’ve played through since Ultima IV, and I can’t even claim to have finished Ultima IV because I got bogged down in The Abyss in 1988 or so and never went back to it.

The genre has advanced a little bit since Ultima IV.

Anyway, I liked the Witcher too, though it’s a completely different sort of game.  It’s basically a single-player version of a MMORPG, right down to the “bring me 10 wolf pelts” style of side quest, and it suffers a little bit from all the running around it makes you do, and it crashes every three hours or so to remind you that you’re playing a PC game and not a console game, but it has two major advantages over an actual MMORPG in that a) it does actually have a story that ENDS and b) it doesn’t have all the annoying people that kind of come with the MMORPG environment.

Also it doesn’t cost 15 bucks a month.

The pacing at the start of the game is atrocious – the game is split into a prologue, 5 “chapters”, and an epilogue, and I felt like I spent half the game in Chapter II – but it was good enough that I stuck with it all the way through.