A Gull and a Bull

Children are the most wonderful invention. Their innocence is so refreshing, particularly the way they assimilate some of our grown up bullshit.

The other day I was standing in the local Asda chatting with Michael while his dynamic duo (that being his children, not his testicles, as dynamic as I'm sure they are) happily amused themselves rearranging the various carbonated beverages into neat displays. Being children they also wanted to partake of such beverages, and Michael being a budget conscious soul (see: cheap) agreed to allow them to select three, thereby invoking the shops own brand three bottles for a solitary pound of her majesties tender covenant.

Alas the bright colours proved too tempting for the young charges, and soon there was a dilemma. With four flavours to choose from, what method of elimination could be employed?

A Britain's Got Talent style competition was ruled out as Simon Cowell is off having expensive fun on his expensive private jet while he lives his expensive life with his antique marble teeth and 1950's yard brush hair; Amanda Holden was too busy shaving her ankles; and Piers Morgan's a cunt.

Strictly Comes Dancing was a no go as Bruce would just blend in with the greeters so we'd constantly lose him, and Tess, let's be fair, Tess' personality is on ITV hosting Beat The Star.

Dancing On Ice was a none starter. We were nowhere near the freezers and if Holly Willoughby had turned up we'd be too busy restocking the milk cages.

In looking at the flavours on offer, Mike seamed to favour Dandelion & Burdock the least. I got this impression from the way he said Dandelion & Burdock as if he was locking tongues with a camel who had just finished giving it's diarrhetic baboon lover a rim job.

Turning to his children I asked if they knew what Dandelion & Burdock was made from. Of course they didn't, they're children.
“Well a dandelion is a flower, I'm sure you've seen them, they're the ones you pick and blow, not unlike a nose.”
They nodded enthusiastically,
“Well, you take some dandelion flowers and you crush them and their seeds down to a pulp.”
Gripping stuff.
“Now do you know what a Burdock is?”
Of course they didn't, no-one does. And going off to Wiki and claiming you do doesn't count.
“A Burdock is a little beetle, about an inch long,”
I held out my fingers and indicated an inch between my thumb and forefinger. Then bringing my other hand into play I commenced the mime,
“and what you do is peel back the wings and scoop out all the soft stuff underneath like the guts and intestines, and then pound that into the mush. And that's where the flavour comes from. It's full of protein, like eating flies and worms.”

“Don't want that one Dad.”

Shit and Damnation

I've been pretty quiet through June thus far. I think this is because I've been trying to catch my breath after what has been a rather viscously delivered metaphoric steel toe capped boot to my love juice factory.

MP's with their nose in the trough is nothing new, and at times of financial hardship I can understand the general population getting angry. Having said that, for all the things this, previous, and successive governments have and will do to get us angry, the expenses issue is a disproportionate smoke screen to real issues, and certainly should not have been used as an excuse for what some people did in the wake of the revelations. As I've said elsewhere recently, I believed being British meant upholding the virtues of freedom and the unequivocal right to live without persecution due to ethnicity, religious belief, gender or sexual orientation. To oppose fascism by spreading light and understanding into every dark corner where it seeks to fester. Clearly I was wrong.

Aside from the misery that is our political system, Duke Nukem Forever failing to materialise and Take 2's reaction is as comedic as it is tragic.

PC gamers fell out of love with Valve after the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2, while Xbox 360 owners decried them for complaining about what will no doubt be a fine sequel, completely missing the point of the anger which isn't that Valve are releasing a sequel, rather that Valve have announced a sequel that contains all the content that purchasers of the first game where told would be made available to them after they'd paid upfront at launch. There's also the issue of splitting the community and further concern that there's still no sign of HL2:Ep3 and questions over whether Valve are moving away from their, until this incident, steadfast supporters in favour of the console market.

On the subject of consoles, consoles are good. There, I said it. While my gaming medium of choice remains the PC, I don't exclude other formats for my gaming fix, and given some recent releases I'm more grateful for the soulless boxes of blasphemy than I have been for a number of years. Some games simply don't warrant a purchase, and in the absence of a rental market for PC games, Blockbuster along with Xbox 360 and PS3 owning friends become all important.

Damnation (360) promised much and delivered nothing. Steampunk by it's very nature is a bit wank, being laughably quaint in it's original vision as future technology. Ignoring the reality though and taking it as the fantasy it is, in the right hands it can work as a marvellous piece of escapism and alternate reality (if that's not hypocritical, which it probably is). There's a number of fine literary examples, Verne and Welles being the most obvious exponents, and inspiring early science fiction cinema and the birth of special effects in Melies works. Gaming wise I struggle to think of any that really made the decision to choose the steampunk route worthy. BioShock just about got away with it by the steampunk elements being relatively incidental, and besides that the only game that springs to mind is The Chaos Engine way back in the Amiga days. I'm sure there's been others, but they clearly fade from memory so as to be worthless. Enter then Damnation to pick up the torch of the forgotten, in the cave of the lost, and immediately piss on the flame of redemption. Now it could be that the steampunk elements work quite well in Damnation, I can't say as I got that far because the game is so horribly broken that anything it may do right is tainted by the mountain of shit it's buried under.

Damnation sees you control a chap named Hamilton (I shit you not) Rourke who fancies himself as Marcus Fenix in a cowboy hat, leading two fellow rebels (a feisty semi naked damsel and a wise ass bullet magnet) on a mission to do something I soon forgot all about as I cursed the AI who kept getting shot and making me go search for them in order to revive them, the visuals that had me thinking I'd developed cataracts, and the acrobatic displays that are supposed to be a key selling point, and in fairness can look quite nice when pulling off a backwards leap from a flagpole onto a broken wall before springing over to face down the generic men in masks, but which most of the time had me mashing the pad wondering why it was refusing to do what it promised if I followed it's instructions. At one point quite early on I was supposed to scale a wall, only halfway up I could neither climb further, move down, or jump to the building behind me. All I could do was move sideways, which was pretty redundant. Handing the pad to my dear friend who had been chuckling away at my increasing levels of hostility, he spent five lateral minutes before declaring the game a “pile of cock”.

It's quite conceivable I missed something significant, and after a reset I must have paid more attention as I progressed a little further, shot a few more men in masks, and revived allies who may as well have just left written instructions before eating a bullet, thereby saving me a lot of time and the enemy some ammunition.

Like I said earlier, some games aren't worth buying, but this festering arse boil isn't even worth the rental price. In fact, if someone offers you this game for free, they're doing so because they hate you, they wish you were dead, and have been sleeping with your mum. And dad.

Equally not worth a purchase, but far better executed and fun for the few hours it lasts is Terminator:Salvation (360). Released to tie in with the new movie, though sans Bale, it has you taking the role of Marcus Fenix again, sorry, no, it's John Connor this time, as you sequentially move between cover points destroying robots. The gameplay really doesn't get more complicated than that. You'll man gun emplacements, including on the back of a truck, but it's all the same really, and that's no bad thing because as I suggested at the start, for the few hours your blasting T-600s and HKs to smithereens you're having fun. Yes, fun. It's why we play games, and sometimes a little bit of mindless action is a good thing. The visuals are also surprisingly colourful, with foliage draping the shattered walls and the smashed cars in the streets still wearing their paint with pride. It may sound strange, but after so much grey and brown with the likes of Gears of War, GTA IV, Fallout 3, Damnation, it was refreshing to see colour splashed around so liberally.

There's no significant characters to get attached to and no meaningful storyline to follow. A linear third person shooter without pretensions in which you, and a friend in co-op if you so desire, will spend an evening blasting robots.

In more serious game related news I've just completed Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (PC). Despite what I'd read about it's bugged nature and incomplete story, I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be far more stable than the original, though the stability could be down to a registry tweak I discovered after completing the first game.

I again followed the path of the light and hope to return in the future as an utter bastard. While the ending doesn't give closure in the same way the first game did, it's still a worthy sequel, and as a nostalgic old man who still remembers the excitement of being taken to the cinema in Birkenhead in 1977 (the one in Wallasey was a bit small and certainly didn't have a decent audio system) and the racing pulse as the blockade runner seemed to pass over my head, this pair of games encompass everything that was good about the fantasy and doesn't shoehorn in an Ewok or irritating Gungan. Not to mention the fact that they are incredibly well crafted and detailed roll playing games.

I do wonder whether The Old Republic MMO could succeed where others have failed to capture me. Though maybe it's too soon to think of such things, still being in mourning for Warhammer as I am.

I also boxed off Call of Duty:World at War (PC). A re-skinned Modern Warfare relocated to WWII and focusing on the Pacific campaign and Russian front, that on paper should have been at least on a par with it's older brother but which failed to capture anything of what made the previous incarnation a delight to play. All too often I found myself pinned down with endlessly spawning enemies charging at me, while my comrades sat around discussing the virtues of needle point and darning in the pacific islands. Okay maybe not, but the one thing they weren't doing was being soldiers, or any use whatsoever. All too often death came from places unknown, forcing slow progress as wave after wave of bayonet wielding Banzai merchants charged. Maybe I expected too much, but World at War sullied my love of the Call of Duty franchise to date, and I even liked the Wii version of Call of Duty 3.

I also took advantage of another of the weekend deals on Steam and purchased the Penumbra Collection (PC). Having played the demo of Black Plague and been impressed enough to add it to my ever expanding list of future purchases, the offer of both Overture and Black Plague along with the add-on Requiem for the ridiculously bargain basement bucket of bliss price of £4.50 was just too glorious a deal to walk away from. Since then I've spent more time than is probably good for me crouching behind boxes and creeping around in the dark.

A first person horror adventure, the emphasis is on exploration and physics based interaction and puzzle solving as you try and discover what happened to the residents of the deserted mine you've stumbling into, and search for a means of escape.

It's still early on in the first game, but it's certainly been a wonderfully terrifying ride so far.

I've also been catching up on some TV. One of the beauties of having the option to series link is that you can wait for the series to finish before watching the lot back to back. Of course the downside is you end up with multiple series and a full box before you know it. Rapidly running out of hours it was time to spend a few evenings watching the second, though unfortunately I believe not final, series of Ashes to Ashes.

I can't quite put my finger on why I haven't enjoyed Ashes to Ashes as much as Life on Mars, though it has to be said, the opening monologue as the title music starts doesn't help,

‘My name is Alex Drake. I’ve just been shot and that bullet...' at which point I'm already screaming “Oh Fuck Off!” at the screen.

Even Life on Mars I felt was stretching it by running to a second series, but the dynamic between Sam and Gene kept things moving along. Sam with his modern techniques and attitudes, Gene embodying the very bad old days, albeit as a caricature of them. They were poles apart in technique but drawn together for the common good, as similar as they were opposed.

I don't see that dynamic with the Alex character, and as we reached the end of the second series I felt Gene had been watered down to the point were he wouldn't have looked out of place in The Bill.

In other TV related fun, Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire is a hoot.

Finally, at hour thirty two, I'm just adding a little note here to remind myself should I ever look back on this with disdain, that it was written during one of my wonderful periods of insomnia, and rather than wait until I've had a good and proper sleep to proof read and edit, I'm lobbing it up in a final act of carefree rebellion to common sense.

But yeh, Krod Mandoon. Good.

At Home with The Dentons - Episode Ten:

Suspension Bridged

Paul: Hi JC.
JC: Hey Paul.
Paul: So, episode ten. Never though we'd get this far.
JC: What?
Paul: This is the tenth episode. Never though it would last this long.
JC: No, no clue what your talking about, so you should just stop talking right now.
Paul: You know, short conversation pieces detailing our sibling interactions.
JC: No, shut up. No clue, be quiet. Look out the window, there's some grass.
Paul: Okay, why are you being strange?
JC: [sighs] Fourth wall?
Paul: Ah. Sorry.

Richard Kershtinkle

The name's Richard Kershtinkle, I'm a private dick. My friends call me Dick, the dick. That's private dick. Being a private dick I get to see a lot of weird shit. There was one the other day at the side of the the burger stand, looked like a pigeon in a Stetson.

I was propping up the bar in Harry's. Why he couldn't have used a workbench or even a chair I don't know. I guess he just wanted that personal touch. Besides, it had been raining most of the day and he'd offered me free drinks while he fixed it in place, so I was glad to help. Harry wasn't accomplished when it came to DIY and was too cheap to get people in to do the refit. I was on my fifth J2O and had pushed the boat out and gone for the Orange & Pomegranate. It was a mistake.

Harry and I were old buddies. We'd knocked about in the same neighbourhood as kids, getting into fights, chasing the girls, getting the ever loving crap kicked out of us when we caught up with them. It was a tough neighbourhood. The compensation Harry got for the time Katie Guffnapper kicked him so hard in the juice box he was left permanently cross eyed had been invested wisely and he'd opened the bar a few years back on the returns. It was lucky he'd seen the ad for The Injury and Accident Lawyers 4 U Claim Group Direct. They offered a no win no fee guarantee to get compensation, or for a small fee knee cap the other party and take their dinner money. In my youthful exuberance I'd urged Harry to go for the knee capping. Katie had once pulled tongues at me, and that kind of pain never goes away.

Harry laboriously fixed the final screws into place so I could let go. Fair play to the old boy, it looked good and level. We tested it out by skimming shot glasses across it like you see in old Westerns. Harry slid down my Orange & Pomegranate. Seriously, don't. It's nasty. I held my breath and swallowed hard.

I bid farewell to Harry and turned to leave. That's when I saw her. Her auburn hair was pushed back behind her ears. Her ears where on the side of her head. Her hair brushed her shoulders as it flowed behind her back. The light caught the waves as they ran like rapids out of sight. I gazed at her as she removed her coat and shook off the precipitation she had collected outside. She stood before me in a cut off tee shirt, blue jeans and a pair of blue Adidas Samba's. Classy.

She walked up to the bar and gestured Harry. Harry looked at her. She gestured again, damn his eyes. She looked at me. I looked at her. We looked at each other. She looked back to Harry. I looked at Harry. Harry looked at us both, I think.

She said she was looking for someone to help her out. I told her I was always available to help a pretty dame, and truth be told I'd help the munters too. I'm not as young as I was and long since sold my principals down the river when I started accepting KFC Bargain Buckets as payment. I said I'd be glad to help her out, took her arm and headed for the door. She stopped me and said that's not what she meant. I told her to be more specific then, I was a busy man and time is chicken. She asked me who I was. I told her I'm Richard Kershtinkle and I'm a private dick. My friends call me Dick, the dick. That's private dick, and that being a private dick I see a lot of weird shit, like the other day there was one in the supermarket car park that with the tyre tread looked like a Semilarvatus Butterfly Fish.

She said she had no time for games. I put the Scrabble away. She said she needed a man. I was a man. She queried the past tense. I assured her the chest luggage was all man, as was the salami looking for flaws in my zip. She told me I was disgusting and ought to be ashamed of myself. I explained that ever since I found myself putting Britain's Got Talent on series link I've been beyond shame. I could see the pity in her eyes, mixing with contempt. She put her hand on my arm and whispered sympathy. I told her to take her sympathy and flush it with the other rotten goldfish. She looked shocked, like a beaver chewing a scaffold pole. I took a step back. She stepped forward. I took another step back. She took another step forward. I jumped to the left. She stepped to her right. I put my hands on my hips. She closed her legs, bringing her knees in tight. I told her that if her name was Janet I would be very likely to soil myself. She said it wasn't, that her name was Florence and that the Kit-Kat in her pocket was just coincidence. Florence. A beautiful name to match the beauty of the city. In her case the city of Sheffield. She opened her mouth, and from this range I could scent the mild garlic from the Kiev she had eaten within the hour. I know my chicken. She told me she'd recently moved into a flat above one of the shops down the street. I asked why I should care. She told me I shouldn't and that she was just trying to make small talk as our conversing seamed to have reached an impasse. I told her that small talk was like foreplay, unnecessary. I asked her if she was going to get to her point as I wasn't going to see her wasting any more of my time, not when there could be a Zinger Wrap worthy case just around the corner. She called me a dead beat and said she wished she hadn't bothered coming in. Thrusting her arms back into her coat and turning towards the door and said she didn't know who I thought I was. So as she stormed back out on to the cold wet streets I reminded her. I'm Richard Kershtinkle, and I'm a dick.

Hero Worship

I've been a bit of a fan of the Guitar Hero games ever since I was given a baptism of beer and pizza with Guitar Hero II on a friends Xbox 360. I even bought both Guitar Hero On Tour (DS) and Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades (DS) leading to many an evening being spent guitar duelling on the couch with the wife.

I'm therefore feeling a little privileged as I got to play the new entry in the ever expanding and market saturating Guitar Hero franchise before it appears in UK stores. Guitar Hero: Metallica (Wii) had me joining a Metallica wannabe band looking to support their heroes by playing Metallica songs past and present along with a number of tracks favoured by the band. There are 28 Metallica tracks and 21 from artists such as Alice in Chains, Foo Fighters, Thin Lizzy and Queen.

I'm sure there can be few who aren't familiar with the Guitar Hero formula, and it's post RockBand expansion to include microphone and drums as of Guitar Hero World Tour. As with previous versions, coloured 'notes' fall down the screen which must be matched by the player by pressing the appropriate colours on the guitar neck and strumming in time with the track. Similarly drums require the appropriate coloured pad or cymbal be struck, and lyrics warbled in roughly the correct key.

This is the second artist specific edition of the franchise, the previous being Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Unlike the Aerosmith edition the track listing here feels solid, and even a none Metallica fan such as myself will be familiar with most of the songs, which adds a comforting element to their playing. There's an additional Bass Drum peddle which can be purchased and a new Expert+ difficulty level so you can really pretend to be Lars Ulrich if you so desire.

One thing I feel the Guitar Hero franchise has, somewhat ironically, failed to effectively simulate is playing the guitar. As a guitar player myself there's always been a feeling of detachment when playing the games. The strum bar is uncomfortable to actually strum, and holding it bears little or no resemblance to holding a plectrum. When I can pick up a guitar and play a track such as She Sells Sanctuary by The Cult, as seen in Aerosmith, there's a distinct feeling that there's something wrong with the interpretation the little plastic codpiece has me fumbling through. When playing with fellow musicians it's the keyboard player, who has never managed to master a real guitar, that gets to live out his Hendrix fantasy. Make of that what you will. By contrast, the drumming (yes I drum too, really rather well!) in both RockBand and Guitar Hero is logical and could actually be an aid to drum tuition.

Like I said, I'm not a Metallica fan so fandom wouldn't be enough to sell me the game. I can play a few Metallica songs though, such as the now staple Enter Sandman, so it was interesting to see that playing the track in the game felt akin to playing the track on guitar. There was a logic to the progression and hand movements that I hadn't experienced in the games before. I don't know whether this is just because the Metallica songs translate better or whether there's been a change in the way the music is converted into the rainbow drops. Whatever the reason, my moment centre stage left me hungry for more and cursing the fact I couldn't take the game home.

The version I was playing was on the Wii so graphically it obviously can't compete with the 360 or PS3, though in my opinion the only graphics that matter are the 'notes' so I've never really understood that being a criticism of the games. Audio on the other hand is paramount, and thankfully things have continued to improve since the somewhat lacklustre audio performance seen in the Wii version of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

Unlike the 360 and PS3, instruments are not interchangeable between the RockBand and Guitar Hero games on Wii, so RockBand owners need to stump up extra cash if they want to join in with their Guitar Hero playing friends. The Guitar Hero instruments require a Wii remote be plugged into them to work, and this is the main issue I have with the pricing policy of the Wii versions. I wouldn't pay the same price for a TV which only worked if I inserted a circuit board I already owned into it as I would for a whole new TV, so why do Activision expect Wii owners to pay the same price for their instruments as 360 and PS3 owners? Whether there's justification for the pricing or not, it looks like Wii owners are getting the mucky part of the woody thing.

Instrument pricing aside, this is certainly my favourite Guitar Hero game to date and has actually made me reappraise Metallica. Maybe I should download some of their songs. They're okay with that, right?

At Home with The Dentons - Episode Nine:

Silent Witless

Paul: Hi JC.
JC: I'm not speaking to you.
Paul: Really? So, you wouldn't mind if I drink all the beer out of the fridge?
JC: ...
Paul: How about I eat all your Doritos?
JC: ...
Paul: I'm just popping to the bathroom with your Sophia Sak pictures.
JC: ENOUGH!
Paul: You're my bitch.

May Play

I believe it was Forrest Gump who said, “I am not a smart man!”. Never has a game had me sat on that white bench eating chocolates quite like Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason (PC), a first person suspense thriller of the highest order. Feeling defensive all of a sudden I should stress it wasn't the puzzles in the game that had me head scratching, as good as they are, but rather the story itself. I lost count of the WTF? moments as a female voice, accompanied by postcards depicting cave drawings, told me about some tribe doing a runner from slavers and then turning on their leader in a forest. Exactly what this had to do with the Russian nuclear icebreaker trapped in the Arctic I was investigating, I really have no clue.

The game seems to have split reviewers as it doesn't sit comfortably in any particular genre. It's played out as a first person shooter, but don't let the guns fool you. There are puzzles that need to be overcome in order to progress, though they are never excessively challenging and function as a way of telling the story of what happened to the stricken ship and her crew.

There are numerous breaks with gaming convention along the way. Rather than health and medi-packs your survival is dependant on your body heat. Finding hot pipes, burning embers, or even light bulbs becomes all important. Weaponry is incidental as while the guns you find are necessary, it is a shooter of a sort after all, you're not gunning your way through enemies with unending supplies of ammunition, but rather using weapons selectively as and when required. The enemies themselves are in the main members of the crew who have become a kind of possessed semi human, and I'm desperately trying not to use the term zombie but failing miserably to come up with a suitable alternative, with the exception of a couple of what could be classed as end of level bosses.

The character you play through the game is a geologist who by a rather fortunate happenstance is gifted with psychic ability. This ability gives you flash backs to some of the events leading up to the ship becoming stranded in the ice. It also gives access to the games primary selling point. Mental Echoes. A number of frozen corpses you come across still have some form of essence that you can use to relive their final moments. In doing so you alter the physicality of your surroundings by correcting their error. For example, accessing the mental echo of a body lying in front of a door leads you to finding a piece of the hinge allowing the crew member to repair the door and escape, which on returning to your own mind has resulted in the pathway now being cleared and the door open.

Of course any self respecting physicist will by this point be having kittens (biologists not withstanding) and screaming terms like 'causality' and 'paradox', and they certainly entered my head on a number of occasions.

At the start of the game there is the not uncommon step of taking you through the gameplay mechanics as you are approaching the ship across the ice. As far as I could tell though, the bodies (yes plural) I was coming across and reliving those final moments of were my own, which lead to my first WTF? moments. On completion it does link back to the start and so corrects itself to some degree, though I was still somewhat perplexed.

There's a horrible term from the past, the 'interactive movie'. Used to describe dreadful FMV titles it has thankfully disappeared from the lexicon, though my personal feeling is that Cryostasis is what an interactive movie should be. It's blend of thriller and investigation driving the story forward makes it compelling viewing, while all the actions of the protagonist being directly controlled by the player means it is still very much a game rather than some passive experience.

Unfairly being labelled a Russian BioShock prior to release may have raised interest but also expectations. Gameplay if more akin to Condemned or Fahrenheit than Rapture's Plasmid and fire-power driven action. Visually the environment is repetitive, you're on a ship in the Arctic after all, though the ice effects, and particularity the melting frost on the walls, are beautiful to behold and never get tired.

Despite my confusion I thoroughly enjoyed Cryostasis and found it to be a breath of frosty fresh air.

The same can't be said of Wheelman (360). Vin Diesel has professed a love of games and so in addition to making mediocre formulaic movies he's now responsible for mediocre formulaic games.

It's easy to dislike Wheelman. The story is farcical in so much as the plot sees Vin driving cars and getting mixed up in a gang war to save a woman from his past. Edam-orific. The Barcelona scenery is colourful and comic as opposed to the gritty realism of GTA IV. The out of car controls are cumbersome and combat against the woeful AI opponents simply reinforces that this is a driving game and you need to get back in a car without delay.

Whatever the developers may have been striving for, one thing they have not delivered is a rival to the afore mentioned GTA IV. This is not a sand box action adventure game. This is a relatively open arcade driving beat-em-up. Preposterous actions like 'Airjacking', which sees you driving behind a target vehicle and then jumping from your vehicle onto the target in order to capture it, wouldn't be seen in the same neighbourhood as Nico Bellic. On that basis a fairer comparison would be to something like Burnout Paradise, which is certainly superior in the driving stakes though loses out in the destructible terrain and lack of vehicle melee combat. Yes, vehicle melee combat. Racing down a street and an opponent pulls up alongside? Shunt your vehicle sideways and give them a crumple zone slap. Ridiculous and hilarious when pulled off. As you progress even more ridiculous moves become available, such as turning the car through 180 degrees while maintaining directional motion so you can shoot the driver of the car tailing you. Not something you could do in the family Zafira, I'm sure.

If Midtown Madness met Road Rash after a few too many and got friendly in an alley, this would be the illegitimate offspring. It's not the best driving or racing game by a long way. It's certainly not the best beat 'em up, obviously. It is arcade tomfoolery and great fun. A game to hire for a weekend of tearing around Barcelona and frightening your sub woofer with Mr Diesels dialogue.

Finally a quick word about Plants Vs Zombies (PC). It's £6.99 on Steam. 'nuff said.