Video Game Reviews

Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires
(PS3 (version tested), XBOX 360)
Review by Blake Harmer

With the video games industry now costing the same as, if not more than, big movie releases, I would expect games (especially sequels) to evolve and create new experiences as well as having better graphics and sound. However, Koei (Now Tecmo Koei due to the recent merger) appear to have done very little.

Those who are new to the Dynasty Warriors franchise the premise is as follows, you choose your hero out of a huge number of 300 characters and go around trying to unite China under one flag by clubbing the other armies into submission with a big weapon, Sauron Style. The Empires iteration of each game adds a light strategic element, you can either control as a ruler and try to conquer each area of the map and eradicate the other rulers from history, or you can play as an officer under a ruler where you have to follow orders but can offer suggestions to affect the rulers decision as you rise through the ranks.

This game suffers from several problems. To begin with, the combat hasn’t really changed since Dynasty Warriors 2 which was a release for the PS2, and despite the increased graphics and processing power of the next generation consoles, the detail of the battlefields and the number of characters on screen at a time haven’t hugely improved since then either. When I tried playing through the game as an officer, I found my ruler seldom invaded territories and decided to send me off doing mundane tasks like killing snow tigers (in China?). I would have tolerated this if it weren’t for the fact that all of my suggestions were ignored so it’s a bit like trying to conquer China, but only when someone with ADD feels like it:

My Ruler (He Jin): We should attack the Snow leopards rather than progressing through the game.
Me: Wouldn’t it be better if we attack here, sir?
He Jin: No, Tigers are way more interesting and...Oooh, fluffy.

My last annoyance with the game came in the form trying to access the multiplayer option. The game said there was a 2 player option but didn’t say how to access it. It was only when I looked online that I found out how to do it. This makes it feel like a cheap after thought for what essentially is just a single player strategic version of Dynasty Warriors 6.

The game still has merits though. The strategic elements of the game (when you play as a ruler) are fun and not too in depth to bring attention away from the true fun, which is the combat. Although I said that the gameplay hasn’t really changed, there is still no better way to relieve stress than to charge into battle and single handedly kill 1,000 people in five minutes. The Dynasty Warriors series is always a great game to play after a bad day at work and this installment is no exception.

Overall, this is a fun game in it’s own right. However, I find it very difficult to recommend it to anyone. Fans of the series will find that the strategic elements have been dumbed down since DW 5: Empires to welcome newcomers to the series, and so they would probably stick to DW 5: Empires. However, as a gamer who enjoys playing the odd Dynasty Warriors game occasionally, I cannot recommend it to newcomers either, as you can pick up an earlier version of the game for far less money. All in all, I recommend this as either a rental for a couple of days, or pick it up when it becomes cheaper. 5/10.

What the hell is so exciting about Wimbledon?

I could live to be a thousand years old, and I will never understand it. Incidentally, what a terrifying prospect a thousand year old Rob Wade would be, eh? I’d be the same verbose geek you know and love, but with a millennia of cynicism behind me. If you think my movie rants are bad now, imagine how they’d be after seeing the movie industry inevitably run out of ideas and resorted to franchise remakes. Fast and Furious 37: Uranus Drift anyone?

Firstly, a warning: I have NEVER seen the appeal of Wimbledon. When I was growing up, the key rivalry that I remember was Agassi-Sampras, where it seemed to be between those two players for the win every year, with the odd win for another player. Even then, I found myself unable to get excited about Wimbledon, even with the appearance of Tim Henman among the players striving to get to the final. Two main reasons clouded my vision, thinking back on it: I was far more interested in professional wrestling, simply because I always admired the athleticism and the colourful characters. Secondly, Tim Henman did the typical English thing and failed at the key juncture. Say what you like, but it’s true of our football team and our tennis players, at the very least.

Anyway, I was watching Wimbledon the other night on my PC, while working on a review for Emotionally Fourteen (it’s this website I contri…oh wait, you’re on it – never mind). It was Andy Murray, the last hope of British tennis against a really good player from another European country, I think it was Switzerland.

The match started at 6pm. I seem to recall that back in the good old days, Wimbledon used to finish at that sort of time. What happened to those days? I remember when the BBC used to provide programming on a regular basis, with no reality shows. Hell, I’m old enough to remember when Eastenders was only on twice a week!

Anyway, this tennis match was the first to use the new roof system they’ve installed over Centre Court, as there’d been worries of a thunderstorm at some point in the evening. Bearing in mind that it was based in the United Kingdom, and that it happened on a day of the week, the risk of the weather turning was understandably high.

The match lasted until twenty to eleven. Interesting that they decided to show the news AFTER the match was over with. I can see BBC Television explaining that one away in my mind:
“Well yes, we appreciate that dozens of people were killed by violence in Iran, and we get that thousands of people either died from swine flu or lost their jobs today. Frankly though, we have nothing but contempt for the public, charging them ever-increasing fees for ever-diminishing original programming, so we’re going to leave them watching a bouncing yellow ball for a few more hours.”

Let’s just put that in perspective: A game of TENNIS lasted nearly five hours. For a bit of explanation of why I find this baffling, allow me to elaborate. All you have to do to win a game of tennis is score 4 before the other guy/girl scores 4. Six games to a set, 3 sets for a win (2 sets for women’s tennis). That means that all you have to do is score 72 points before the other player (48 if it’s women’s tennis). How the hell can 72 points last five hours unless each point lasts 4 minutes? And why the fuck would anyone still be watching if each point lasted 4 minutes?

Oh yeah...

Book Reviews

The Highwayman
R.A. Salvatore
Pan MacMillan
Review by Brad Harmer

Here's an open plea to all writers of fantasy: Just because Middle-Earth was a giant sprawling epic, it doesn't mean that yours has to be as well. Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone is barely 150 pages, and David Gemmell's Legend wraps up in around four hundred. Say it with me now: length does not equal depth.

On that note, here is R.A. Salvatore's latest novel The Highwayman. The big surprise? It's the first book in his new "Saga of the First King" series. As result, not much is going to happen, as a story which is supposed to take three to four hundred pages is turned into a trilogy that will have to spread nearly a thousand. See my happy face.

First, we're introduced to two characters, Bran Dynard and Sen Wi, they have a baby, and then they die. The thing is, they aren't killed until about nearly hundred and fifty pages into the four-hundred page book. They're introduced like they're major characters, and then: "BANG! Hope you enjoyed the prologue. Here's the real beginning.".

Their kid is the titular Highwayman, who suffers from cerebral palsy, but can overcome his ability by mastering his Chi. By mastering his Chi, he can talk, become a master swordsman, and is definitely not Zorro, okay? Definitely not Zorro. Anyway, he's out to find out more about his now dead parents, and indulge in all kinds of swordplay along the way.

This book isn't all bad. Salvatore is a good writer when he doesn't get bogged down under his own bumpf, and the action sequences are very cinematic. Swordfights are a hard thing to get done right in a book, and Salvatore pulls it off. He's had more practice than most, granted, but it's still a fun read from that respect. The disability that the Highwayman suffers from makes the reader empathise with him very well. Most of the characters are actually pretty good. They're original, all well-defined, and despite the similarities of their names (Bransen, Bannagran and Bernivvigar are all major characters), I was never confused as to which was which.

However, the pacing is way off. This could have been a fun one-off novel, but once again a fantasy writer's inability to write something a little bit shorter than The Count of Monte Cristo has totally skewed the pacing in what should have been a quick-read swashbuckler, and is instead a turgid exercise in patience.

The Emotionally Fourteen Rating
Violence: Lots of battles and gratuitous swordplay. Some moderate torture scenes.

Sex/Nudity: None

Swearing: Some mild.

Other points in favour: We should cut him some slack. This guy killed Chewie.

Summary: A wasted opportunity, brought down by its own ego. Probably okay if you're into that sort of thing, but there are many better examples of the genre. - 4/10

Daemon
Daniel Suarez
Quercus
Review by Brad Harmer

There’s not enough cyberpunk around. Probably the most important science-fiction sub-genre ever, and its more or less petered out these days. Daemon, the debut novel from Daniel Suarez, isn’t technically cyberpunk, but it at least draws inspiration from there, and mixes in a healthy dose of mainstream thriller influences to create a highly enjoyable and fast paced book. There are car chases, malicious artificial intelligence, and a massive conspiracy holding it all together. So, what makes it different from The Matrix series?

Matthew Sobol, programming genius, founder of Cyberstorm Entertainment, one of the richest and most powerful of Silicon Valley’s elite, is dead, but his final creation lives on to execute his last will and testament.

At the moment of Sobol’s death, computer programmes around the world burst into life, creating an entity known as the Daemon. The Daemon infiltrates our hyper-connected society, gathering secrets, stealing identities. Soon it has the power to change lives as well as the power to take them: those who serve the Daemon are rewarded; those who defy it are eliminated. Recruiting acolytes from the dispossessed and disaffected, the Daemon secures a growing stranglehold on the world’s most precious commodity: information. And once you control information itself, how easy would it be to remake the world?

It’s up to an unlikely alliance – Peter Sebeck (a computer illiterate detective) and John Ross (a white-collar hacker, with a ton of secrets) – to challenge the monster that Sobol unleashed from beyond the grave. But before they can confront the Daemon, they have to find out what it wants.

The blending of technology that actually exists now combined with some high sci-fi, is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s obviously intended to hint that this is just a few years or months into the future, and that this kind of stuff isn’t that far away from what we have now. But unfortunately, the stuff like the automated killer hummers and the sunglasses that hover icons over everyone are just that little bit too far fetched to be seen as realistic. As sci-fi, they work. However, placed side-by-side with modern day technology, the effect is a little jarring. And the killer motorcycles bristling with blades? Sorry, but they are just dumb, and someone should have edited those out.

The scenes that take place within The Gate (a fictional World of Warcraft/Age of Conan style MMORPG), and Over The Rhine (a WWII FPS) are some of the best, and the crossover between the real world and second dimension that the Daemon has created is nothing short of genius. Its only when the video-game-esque action spills over into the real world that it looks a little dumb. They are frequently way too unrealistic in terms of their pulp style, contrasted with the gritty and realistic depiction of blood and gore through the rest of the novel. The high-tech/low-tech, the pulp action/the CSI grit - Daemon is just too much of a mish-mash of incongruous takes on the subject matter to really feel like a solid piece of work, and the last thirty pages or so unfortunately devolve from a good techno-thriller into a really shitty nineties action movie.

As mentioned earlier, Daemon has a stab at both cyberpunk and the modern thriller; but as a result of that it doesn’t manage to quite nail either. Fans of thrillers will be put off by the pseudo-techno-babble and “leet” parlance that peppers the novel, and fans of cyberpunk will sneer at the action set-pieces that require extraordinary suspension of disbelief. That’s not to say that it is a bad book. It’s just a book that may have a hard time finding its true audience, as it never really decides what sort of book it wants to be.

The Emotionally Fourteen Rating:
Violence: Several creative death sequences. Very descriptive gore.

Sex/Nudity: None

Swearing: A realistic amount

Summary: A book that’s so divergent in its style that it’s hard to really know what to make of it. It’s a very original idea, but could have been executed a little better. I look forward to Daniel Suarez’s next novel, as once he hits his stride, he could do very great things. – 6/10