Video Games Killed the Radio Star

Rise of Nightmares In the 90s, there was this game called Legend Quest. You’d gather three friends and stand in a hollowed-out plastic tree stump in a shop window. It was a pioneering virtual reality adventure for young heroes with a thirst for questing that couldn’t be sated by the Dragonlance Chronicles. Fearless young men would pay for the privilege of jousting with spiders wrought from six or seven polygons and test their wits against puzzles that involved getting a key off a pedestal and taking it to a nearby door. And when our 15-minute slot in the magical fantasy universe came to an end, we would remove our helmets and face up to a new set of adversaries: the crowd of young men at the window who’d just found four new socially retarded children to bully. What I’m saying is, I don’t mind being made to look like a cunt. I enjoy it. It gives me stuff to write about. But Rise of Nightmares (Sega, Kinect) treats you like the biggest prick in the world. It’s the world’s first adult Kinect game and it’s by the people who made the on-rails shooter with hilariously ultra-naff dialogue, House of the Dead. The trailers promised a madcap world of deadly high-jinks. The game is more like… well, you know those big inflatable fan-powered things with the flapping arms—those guys you see outside car showrooms in America and on Family Guy—it’s like one of those is up to its waist in shit treacle. Here’s how adult it is: there’s a toilet, full of blood. Imagine that, granddad. And when you look at this toilet, a big INTERACT sign appears over it. This is how the game lets you know you can interact with things. So, you dutifully walk over, reach forwards, and put your hand over the INTERACT badge.

Now you have to guess what gesture it wants you to make. I try flushing, but the act of reaching forward triggers the actual gesture it wanted me to make, which was to

rummage around in the blood-filled toilet and find a tiny key. I didn’t even know I needed a key—I hadn’t yet checked out the nearby door. But my character’s clearly the kind of guy who believes in rummaging around in bogs on the off-chance. Later on, there’s another key, hidden inside the guts of a man. With this level of adult entertainment, I’m amazed there wasn’t an entire level where you pull dozens of increasingly ornate keys out of a wall of sputtering bumholes. It takes a special kind of effort to make a gleefully murderous psychopath character boring. And somehow, between the directing, script and acting, they’ve managed to make a character who’s a dog with the head of a human completely charmless. Rise of Nightmares is a cold, dead slap in the face to anyone who was hoping to be either scared, amused or in any way entertained. Star Fox 64 3D Having spent that long on a shit game, let’s spend no time at all on some good ones. Star Fox 64 3D (Nintendo, 3DS) is good. It is a good game, I liked it, thank you. The HD remake of Resi 4 will probably kick-start a new spate of ponderous best-game-ever essays, but it’s a game that I played with a friend, and he went out and bought a Gamecube. I don’t think he ever bought another game for it. Resistance 3 (PS3) is supposed to be OK, too, in that competent but magicless way that most shooters are OK. I haven’t played it, though—for all the replies I’ve had, my emails to Sony’s PR team seem to be written in fucking Gallifreyan hieroglyphs. Resistance 3 Gears of War 3 (Epic, Xbox 360), then. Having just flobbed on shooters and called them unmagical things, I’ll admit that Gears has always taken cover in its own meaty furrow. The entertaining, hyper-manly bullshit of the first game was softened in the sequel by Dom having a muscular cry over his lobotomised wife, and the third game gives Cole Train and Marcus their chance to explore their personal stories. Cole gets to relive his glory days in a way that’ll have you banging your wrist happily against your forehead. Marcus finds out his dad’s alive and gets to deal with that in his voice that’s made of grit and sausages. The game hasn’t changed much, so the campaign is more fan service than innovation. Just try to play it with human co-op partners, as the AI’s a bit too hardy and you can get spoiled relying on them to revive you. The other multiplayer modes are better still, with Horde 2.0 adding an element of base-building, defence and a new strand of levelling up. And the deathmatch stuff isn’t to my taste, for the same reason I don’t choose to stand naked in playgrounds. But I’m assured by my less nude friends that it’s fantastic. Gears of War 3