Guitar Hero: World Tour!

Several years have passed since Guitar Hero first made expensive music peripherals ridiculously popular. Every iteration of the game brought better controllers, more realistic note tracking, and progressively impressive setlists (with the exception of Rocks the 80s). But the music genre's gotten crowded in recent years, and to keep up with the growing popularity and multiplayer appeal of Rock Band 2, World Tour is a necessary evolution of the Guitar Hero franchise. While World Tour delivers a "rock experience" that's similar to Rock Band, it does have some issues that keep it from trouncing its competition completely.

The core game delivers on the same "feels like you're making real music while pushing buttons on a plastic guitar" experience that you expect from Guitar Hero. World Tour finally fixes Guitar Hero III's punishingly steep difficulty curve, which went from middlingly easy to roundhouse groin-kick difficulty in the space of a couple of songs. The venues, as always, are superpolished and full of tiny details that make them interesting to watch. Whether it's a massive stadium or a college frat house, I was consistently impressed.

Guitar Hero definitively one-ups Rock Band in one respect -- avatar customization. Going beyond just hairstyles and costume changes, you can alter everything from the size of your skull to the angle of your chin. It's hard, at first, to make a character that doesn't look hideously deformed, but with a little tweaking, you can make impressive semblances of almost anyone. You can even choose the dances your character does at the beginning and end of a song, though you can't make your own choreography. All of this strengthens the connection to your avatar, but my favorite part is the instrument customization. Body, colors, strings, heads -- you can alter every minute layer of your instrument, making the entire presentation that much more personal.

But I can't talk about the game without discussing the peripherals. Provided you pick up the full instrument bundle, you'll notice immediately that the drums are awesome: They're easy to set up and adjust, the drumheads give easy bounce and excellent rolls, and the raised "cymbals" give you plenty of room to maneuver. It's nowhere near as nice as a real electric drum kit, but for a videogame peripheral, it's damn impressive. But Guitar Hero isn't prejudiced against Rock Band converts -- the game automatically detects whether you're using a four- or five-pad kit (if you're sticking with the Rock Band drums) and adjusts accordingly.

The guitar is basically the same as previous iterations, with a loud, clicky strum bar and large, raised buttons. The touch-sensitive pad on the neck, however, is new. It's a gimmicky addition that always throws my playing off when I try to use it, especially on expert. That said, tapping on the touch pad instead of strumming can give your hand a much needed rest during long play sessions. The best addition is a separate button for activating star power, which is under the heel of your strumming hand (though it's a little too close to the start button, making it too easy to inadvertently pause the action).

Bass, while not a separate peripheral, does spice up the gameplay a little. Fans of Rock Band will still face the same uneven difficulty levels (either intensely difficult or lull-inducing), but an extra "open" note has been added. A vertical line, just like the drum foot-pedal indicator, instructs you to hit the strum bar without holding any buttons. While it doesn't really make the parts any harder, it's an intelligent addition. And anything that makes bass a little more fun is a plus.

"Guitar Hero" is in the title for a reason, though. The majority of the songs are definitely geared toward hardcore guitar players and people who love extended ax solos. But that's not to say there aren't plenty of great popular tunes. From Michael Jackson to Modest Mouse to Willie Nelson, World Tour brings in a little something from a wide range of genres. I would prefer a little less metal, but there are plenty of songs -- like Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" -- that I could listen to every day without getting burnt out.

Guitar duels from GH3 return, but only in the solo guitar career mode. This time, instead of throwing obstacles at your enemy until someone fails, you just have to hold your own in a tug-of-war. It feels much fairer, since you'll win as long as you can play the song decently...even if it doesn't make the meandering solos any more enjoyable to listen to.

With the wildly eclectic mix of music, most players probably won't take advantage of the game's solo singing career mode. The karaoke is just something to let your rhythmically challenged friends join in with while you jam, anyway. But when playing with friends, GH's not quite the party game that Rock Band 2 is. If you're doing poorly, you can pull from a shared star power/overdrive meter, but it doesn't allow you to bring your friends back into the fold if they can't keep up -- if one person fails, the whole band goes under. It gives the game more of an arcade feel, where you're just struggling not to fail. Like the first Rock Band, the band is completely divorced from each instrument's solo career. To really "complete" the game, you're forced to play through all of the same songs over and over again with each individual instrument -- and then all over again in full-band mode. If they didn't want to copy Rock Band 2's superior model (where all career paths and instruments are grouped into one overarching progression), couldn't Neversoft at least have made separate songs available in each career track?

The big new feature is the ability to create and share songs with other users. Spore and LittleBigPlanet have shown that, given the tools, players will create content that not even the developers could have envisioned. (They've also proven that, given the freedom, people will make vulgar shapes -- look forward to scrolling penis marquees aplenty.) But unlike those games, GH's music creator is unwieldy and difficult to use. It's easy enough to record a freestyle track, but editing it and creating something really high quality is very challenging. The tutorials aren't deep enough, and even worse is the inability to use the controller as a master input device -- you're stuck using the guitar or drums, which are serviceable but not comfortable. For our review purposes, Neversoft uploaded a few custom tracks to test uploading and downloading on the system, but no user-created songs were available. However, I have faith that some players will put in the time and suffer through the interface to create some really good music, eventually.

Maybe if I squeeze my Rock Band and Guitar Hero together and leave them overnight in the same case, I can come back the next morning to find that they made an über-game that combines the best of both. But until then, Guitar Hero delivers exactly the things I want out of a rhythm game: great peripherals and fun-to-play music. It's not perfect, but I have a great time whenever I turn it on -- and that's what's most important.

Tonight...We shall rock!

When pimping his studio's ubiquitous band simulator in the press, Harmonix cofounder Alex Rigopulos is fond of calling Rock Band a "platform for music," like Apple's iPod and iTunes. In that sense, Rock Band 2 is more like a system update than a sequel. It's a collection of interface tweaks and non-earth-shattering new features designed to make the Rock Band experience more enjoyable and less frustrating. You get backward compatibility for all your downloaded material and 55 of the original game's 58 songs (after ponying up $5), an easier-to-navigate library, game-changing rule sets (the No Fail mode definitely makes drunken-party play less stressful for beginners), daily updated online challenges (Battle of the Bands), tougher, quieter, wireless hardware (if you're made of money), and, most notably, a couple of drum-training modes that teach aspiring pizza-delivery boys real-life drum beats and fills.

The real attraction here is the game's Sticky Fingers-like bulge of music. With 84 tunes on the disc (all are original recordings) and 20 free downloads form the online store, Rock Band 2 is simply the cheapest way to beef up your library. Not to belittle the selections here -- music taste is extremely personal, of course, and no matter what your preferences are, you'll likely end up despising 10 or 15 songs. But Rock Band 2's offerings are ambitious compared to the original game's lineup, with several major gets that would have seemed impossible just a year ago. Who ever thought they'd be able to play a classic Bob Dylan song in a videogame? Or "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads?

Unfortunately, both songs are a bit of a failure as rhythm-game material, holding true to the strange truism that music you like in real life often doesn't make the cut in game form. But that's part of Harmonix's approach to the genre, often forgoing a great game experience in favor of a great music experience. So, just like the first game, you'll find songs here that entertain on one instrument and bore on another. And like the first game, at higher levels of play, you'll experience the sensation of real musicianship, plastic instruments be damned. Who cares how many gems are on the screen when, for a few minutes in the company of good friends, you can have a taste of what it feels like to be Dave Grohl, pounding his way through the monstrous, spiraling tom fills of "Everlong" -- albeit with lightweight sticks and drums that sit about an inch away from each other.

Along with the positive tweaks, Rock Band 2 has its share of negatives. I'm no fan of unlockable content, and I don't think anyone should have to jump through hoops to access material that they've already spent good money for. The forcible song unlocks of the original game were bad enough, but Rock Band 2 has taken it to an extreme. Gone is the straightforward, linear trip through the game's setlist, replaced here with the familiar tour mode and a new challenge mode. Both force you to play though the same songs again and again in order to make new songs available in your library. I don't know about you, but the first thing I wanted to do with Rock Band 2 was invite a bunch of people over for cocktails and rock, and it was such a bummer to be limited to the songs I could unlock in four or five hours of solo play. Gamers are used to these unlocking regimes, but the whole thing was baffling to my nongamer friends, especially considering that songs you buy online are immediately available (of course!). Next time around, this unyielding structure needs to go. And with the increasing number of songs available, I was desperate for a way to hide songs I didn't like from the library menu. They just take up space and party time, and if one more person comes to my apartment and demands to sing "Say It Ain't So," I'm going break the disc in half.

We still need more songs that girls like to sing (though that is pretty much a problem with rock music, not Rock Band), and the game's music selection is approaching a nearly unbearable level of suburban whiteness (surely, if Duran Duran are a "rock band," then Al Green, Funkadelic, Booker T. and the MG's, Prince, and any number of soul and funk groups backed by traditional rock rhythm sections qualify), but Rock Band remains the ultimate party game and a karaoke killer. I just wonder what Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, Harmonix cofounders and M.I.T. Media Lab graduates who spent their time creating musical instruments for nonmusicians before turning their focus to videogames, are really up to. Surely, the people who revolutionized the music genre and popularized it in the West are working on something more ambitious than a system update. I'm dying to play it.

FallOut!

In 1992 all the cool kids wore happy pants. They were very trendy at the time, and the joy these garments delivered to wearers and onlookers alike was palpable.

These 'happy pants' were often seen with vivid patterns and lurid fluorescent colours. Then one day... they were gone.

The same tragic fate that met these courageous trousers almost happened to Fallout 3 in Australia.

Simply put, Fallout 3 is looking like one of the best RPGs ever made.

Think of it as like a sci-fi version of Elder Scrolls Oblivion where you don't have to follow any rigid path or direction and can do what you want, when you want.

It's the kind of game that gamers have wet dreams about.

Like the happy pants phenomenon, Fallout 3 was the most anticipated products in several years, and then the Classification Board whose name was changed from the OFLC (Orifice of Film and Literature Condemnation), decided to ban it. Thanks Reg. You're a right bastard.

But wait... What's that in the distance... Respect for the Australian games industry?!

Fallout 3's creators, Bethesda Game Studios, created a 'toned down' version so as not to offend the tender eyes and ears of the half-dozen geriatric hard-liners at the Classification Board, and come October 31st 2008, we'll get to play the game.

The violence has been toned down in the "child-friendly" Australian version - because clearly in the eyes of the government drop kicks, all gamers are children - but the essence of the game will be unchanged.

The year is... I don't know what year the game is set in because my researcher, Neville, was attacked by a large sewer rodent and he's in remission.

Well, it is the future in Fallout 3, as you climb out of a bunker into the wasteland of Washington DC, which appears to be ravaged by a nuclear fallout.

You can play the game from either first- or third-person perspectives, and as I said before it's like a futuristic version of Elder Scrolls Oblivion.

Climb out of your vault, which is where you were born and shielded from the cruel harshness of reality, and like all really clever games you can go almost anywhere you want and do almost anything (as long as it involves moving and shooting).

Want to see what remains of the Potomac river? Go for a trek and find out. Want to sit in El Presidente's chair and smoke a cigar? Give it a go. Want to throw cans of food at mutant humanoids? Be my guest.

After decades hidden away in protected vault, while the surface of the Earth was poisoned with radioactive isotopes from the nuclear conflagration, the flora and fauna has been mutated and on your travels you'll encounter all manner of hideous beasts.

Like all good RPGs, the more killing you do, the more experience you'll get and you can spend these points on a large variety of skills and perks, from the handling of various types of weapons and armour to the ability to heal and use medicines more effectively.

You use the Pip Boy, which is an oversized wrist-watch of sorts, to monitor you status, view your character traits and basically do all your statistical analysis and number crunching.

The game plays like most first-person shooters: walk around, shoot things, pick up health items, marvel at the desolation, solve a few riddles, complete a handful of quests.

Graphically the game is looking very polished, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions look good in high definition.

There's a dusty, grimy, rather downtrodden feel to the game that permeates the visual style, and helps immerse you in this particular vision of the future.

But Fallout 3 delivers not only gorgeous graphics and the cool RPG aspects of forming your own unique gun-toting madman (or mad woman). There's more...

Let me introduce you to the Vault-Tech Assisted Targeting System (VATS).

This splendid little system allows you to queue up attacks and then unleash them on your foetid enemies, all in ultra-sexy happy pants-style cinematic glory.

VATS allows you to basically stop time and then individually target different parts of you enemies, such as the head, legs, arms, torso, crotch, etc.

When you resume play, you get a mega wicked cut-scene that usually involves fatalities, exploding heads, and other amusing but fictional (and potentially censored in Australia) occurrences.

Whether using long range fire arms or hand-to-hand bludgeoning weapons, the game shows off its excellent eye-candy and cool camera angles when the VATS system is activated, and the ensuing cut scenes are also very gory - a tip of the hat to the previous Fallout games.

However, using the VATS is not something you can do whenever you like.

You need action points to initiate the system, and in some cases these can run out very quickly so you need to be judicious with your use of the system.

So, there's open-ended gameplay, slow-mo ultra-gore kills, RPG character leveling, a huge array of weapons and equipment with which to experiment on angry super mutants, sweaty people and crafty slavers within the massive wasteland of Washington DC. And all the while there's a sinister plot going on in background...

And no sign of the Vengabus...

Bethesda has also ensured that there's a smattering of humour in there, as has been the tradition with previous Fallout games, but we'll judge that when we play the final game.

There's a fine line between humour and stupidity, as we all know.

Thus far Fallout 3 is looking like every bit the blockbuster game its billed as, and is already one of the most anticipated games of the upcoming Christmas season; expect it to dominate the sales charts when it launches.

The game is due out later in October, 2008, and Vlatko Andonov, president of Bethesda Softworks, sounded pumped: "We are very excited to let gamers get their hands on Fallout 3, the latest chapter in this beloved and highly acclaimed franchise.

"To meet the huge demand for this title by our fans worldwide, we are planning one of the biggest launches of any game released this year," said Andonov, who may or may not have supernatural powers.

Given an MA15+ rating by the Australian Classification Board, Fallout 3 is looking very spicy, and could be our generation's happy pants: controversial but cool. We can only hope...

BigLittlePlanet? LittleBigPlanet

It was the little game with big ideas. A compact, cute PS3 platform game from a tiny indie studio that wanted the world to muck in with its making, using level and object creation tools. But with time (and not very much of it at that), LittleBigPlanet became a very big game indeed.

It took off, like one of its own rocket-propelled skateboards. It became the poster-child for a new generation of gaming; commentators and Sony executives showered it in buzzwords, talking up connected communities creating constellations of content, portraying LittleBigPlanet as Spore in skate pants.

Sony got giddy with all the reflected glory and love. First it promoted the game's Sackboy avatar to platform mascot and ubiquitous totem of cool, and then elevated LittleBigPlanet itself to the status of a triple-A, blockbuster tent-pole of its entire platform strategy. It as good as said that this was the game that would save PS3, and even those who'd loved it at first sight had to wonder whether Media Molecule's funky experiment could take the strain.

Amidst all this big talk though, one of the game's big ideas got lost in the chatter: an idea that will probably mean more to more people than any of the Game 3.0 posturing and theorising, or the daringly ambitious online features, or the astonishing freedom of the creative tools. LittleBigPlanet sets out to resurrect the simple fun of a game you control with left, right and jump. It sets out to make the side-scrolling platform game relevant and exciting again. And it succeeds.

With its homespun beauty, irrepressible charm, wild momentum and tactile physics, LittleBigPlanet strongly recalls Nintendo's 1995 classic Yoshi's Island - and while it's nothing like as perfect a platformer, it's enough of a compliment to say that it can stand up to the comparison at all. The game's Story mode is a suite of some 20-odd levels made by Media Molecule that circumnavigate LittleBigPlanet's imaginary world.


The Tudor gardens of Britain; the African savannah; a haunted Tim Burton wedding in some spooky alternative South America; and on through Mexican badlands, American cities, mystical interludes in Japan and India, and a devious parody of a Siberian villain's lair. The conceit is that every themed stop on the way is curated by a creator, a king or magician who sets the scene and the challenges, the way players are later invited to themselves.

It's all portrayed in the game's unforgettable visuals, a dreamlike diorama of cardboard and sponge that blends the home-made aesthetic of Michel Gondry music videos with the heady surrealism and humour of stop-motion children's TV from decades ago, shows like The Clangers or The Magic Roundabout. The sticky-back-plastic stylisation clashes headlong with extreme realism; the rendering of light sources and textured surfaces is scientifically exact, as total a realisation of high-definition as you'll see anywhere in games this year. Characters, hazards and contraptions are conjured out of household objects, trinkets, plain chunks of material, stickers, gears and pullies and motors and joints.

It's a marvel: a high-res, low-fi animated sketchbook that never fails to delight and astonish, even if the art in some stages has less charm than in others (the Japanese and Indian stages being the swoonsome highlight). Drinking in every detail is a compelling enough reason for several playthroughs of this fairly short Story mode. The vast number of hidden collectables is another: all of them are valuable and useful, being stickers, materials, machines, objects, tools or decorations to use in the game's Create mode, or costume pieces for dressing up the Sackboys (an addictive diversion in itself), or mini-game levels.

You'll also want to return to play as much of the game as you can in multiplayer. The levels and goals are identical - with the exception of a few optional puzzles for multiple players only - but with more than one Sackboy running around, LittleBigPlanet becomes a loosely-structured scrum of competition, collaboration and sheer, joyful mucking around. There are mini-races, and the scramble to collect bubbles of stuff for your score - those bubbles add a score multiplier if you chain them, and pop with a deliciously moreish sound. The camera scales competently for four players on a single machine, and it's played this way that LittleBigPlanet is at its absolute best: an irresistible, riotous, social and totally accessible entertainment.

The game's physics have a huge part to play in this. In keeping with the theme of conjuring fantasy from the realistic and mundane, the physics are consistent but also exaggerated and slightly slowed, and the PS3's processing power taxed to the point of slowdown in a couple of places by the sheer amount of bouncing, collapsing, pinwheeling chaos, as well as the blistering speeds achieved in some vehicle sections. It's slapstick of the highest order, and again, adding extra players just adds to the feedback-loop of fun.

With physics as the basic building block, Media Molecule has designed levels around momentum and mechanical ingenuity more than taxing puzzles or acrobatic challenges. The quality isn't totally consistent - the game drags a little in the finicky and generic Mexican section, about halfway through. The mini-game levels seem rather arbitrary and pointless solo, although if you use the Quick Play option to chain them in multiplayer, they can sustain an uproarious hour or two. But the second half of Story mode is mostly fantastic, and at their most ingenious and surprising, the systems of cogs and tunnels and traps that the Sackboys tumble through are worthy of Nintendo's best designs.

The controls and the lives system, however, are not. Sackboys are fun to manipulate, especially the puppeteering you can do with their facial expressions and gestures, but also just their easy, bouncing joie-de-vivre. But there's the slightest lack of precision and definition to the floaty jump, a hint of stickiness, the timing's off by a fraction of a fraction of a second. When the game presents you with exacting challenges of dexterity and timing, as it occasionally does, that's a minor annoyance. When it's combined with the vague, slow and over-zealously auto-corrected movement between the game's three planes of depth, it's a problem.

Then there's the checkpoint lives system, which gives you an infinite number of lives for a level, but only three (or on too-rare occasions, six) for any given checkpoint. Although checkpoints are generously and well placed, three lives just aren't enough for some of the harder sections, and if you lose them all, it's back to the start of the level. Abandoning lives completely would have stripped all the tension out of the game, but this inflexible system creates half a dozen chokepoints of almost unbearable, teeth-grinding irritation that simply didn't need to be there.

LittleBigPlanet is a great platform game. It's not a perfect one. It doesn't need to be, though, because its creative tools turn it into something else entirely, a unique, hilarious, endless entertainment. Even - and this is an absolutely crucial point - if you never use them.

Go to Cool Levels, and LittleBigPlanet presents you with an alternative world of stages created by other players, scattered around randomly to encourage you to browse and take punts on things. A genius tagging system - where you're asked to pick one of a random selection of words to describe a level after you've played it - combined with "heart" scores (hearting is LittleBigPlanet's equivalent of digg.com's digging, and also works as a bookmark for favourite items in Create mode) makes it easy to get a feel for what's worth trying. Levels download very quickly, too, and can be saved to the hard drive for posterity, or to edit yourself later. The review copy of the game could have done with more powerful and flexible search features, but we understand this will be addressed in the final version.

And the levels themselves, based on those generated by the game's beta test alone, are simply extraordinary. You haven't seen anything like this in videogames before. Finely-tuned pieces of platform-game design are understandably rare, and attempts to recreate others, like Super Mario Bros' first level, don't even remotely work. But these are replaced by a wild creativity and anarchic humour that no organised development studio could ever hope to create, and a sort of gleeful ignorance of the need to have a point or be a challenge or submit to any kind of traditional concept of what a videogame level should be.

There are plenty of one-shot jokes and inventions: the car that plays Sweet Child O' Mine; the fanboy jab at the Xbox 360's red ring of death; the comedically cack-handed Rick Roll. The best levels are just playgrounds filled with bizarre toys, or sort of interactive theatre performances that interject a little light platforming into variously stupid or strange stories. The two-part Heist - the story of a bank job gone wrong - has already established itself as an artful classic; you can also shoot Sackboy to a cardboard moon on an Apollo mission or, in the memorably eerie Asgard, pick your way through a forest of giant, electrified glass Sackboys, your image warping as though you're in a hall of mirrors.

The quality and diversity are already surprising. In reality, deep and rewarding gameplay will only feature in a tiny percentage of levels - it will take more professionally-designed levels to truly extend the lifespan of LittleBigPlanet as a platform game - but it doesn't matter. As an endlessly renewable sideshow, a daily source of surprises and silliness, a genuinely new form of interactive entertainment, it's a triumph - and one for which Media Molecule can actually only take some of the credit.

That credit goes to the handful of players dedicated enough to go through the painstaking hour upon hour upon hour of work necessary to put these levels together. And herein lies LittleBigPlanet's greatest disappointment - or at least, its double-edged sword. Create mode is an incredible achievement, allowing tremendous scope for freedom (especially in its mechanical tools) within the simple, logical and fast Popit interface, and accompanied by an exhaustive suite of tutorials narrated by an avuncular Stephen Fry. And yet, it's still really quite hard to make things.

That's partly down to some minor niggles with the interface (the laborious undo command, the counter-intuitive "pause" rules, the inefficient lack of shortcut commands). It's mostly down to the overwhelming depth of customisation and parameter-tweaking that's possible, but that can't be a bad thing. Can it?

Perhaps it can. It depends who Media Molecule wants to involve in LittleBigPlanet, and what it wants them to create. Cool Levels is already populated with the work of a talented hardcore who will serve the rest of the game's community with entertainment for years. But the creation, as it stands, isn't going to involve the majority of players of the game. It won't let them do the things they want to do - put their own images or music straight in a level (unless it's by taking pictures with an EyeToy). It will let them do hundreds of things they don't want to do or would never think of. And the three planes of action add a fiddly layer of organisational complexity in themselves: it might have been more accessible to limit creation to a single, flat plane to lower the barrier to entry.

The promise that anyone could create something simple and fun and personal with LittleBigPlanet hasn't come true. In a way, it's the opposite of Spore, which makes it easy and fun for every single player to have creative input, but doesn't let any of them change the fabric of the game. LittleBigPlanet lets them run wild, with unprecedented results, but it locks the majority out of the creative process, because it's time-consuming and simply not very enjoyable.

We hoped it could do both those things. That it doesn't isn't the let-down it might have been, thanks to the untamed community of brilliant nutjobs that's already out there, appending their DIY masterpieces to this beautiful, mildly flawed, magnificently multiplayer platform game. We salute them, we salute Media Molecule for making it possible for them, and we salute Sony for its total commitment to this brave, hare-brained project.

But mostly, we're just happy to see a flagship game for a modern system that's about running from left to right and jumping over things. New ideas are great, great old ideas are better, and LittleBigPlanet has both: it's the future and the past of videogames, rolled into one.

GTA IV

If San Andreas was great for your enjoyment...then think again!


The Good

* Superb character-driven story
* Liberty City really does feel alive
* Multiplayer modes that let 16 players go wild across the entire city
* Genuinely funny radio and TV shows, comedy acts, and character dialogue
* Controls are much improved over previous games.



The Bad

* Occasional problems with friendly AI
* Some minor visual quirks.





Stepping off a boat in the shoes of illegal immigrant Niko Bellic as he arrives in Liberty City at the start of Grand Theft Auto IV, you can tell immediately that Rockstar North's latest offering is something quite special. Yes, this is another GTA game in which you'll likely spend the bulk of your time stealing cars and gunning down cops and criminals, but it's also much more than that. GTAIV is a game with a compelling and nonlinear storyline, a game with a great protagonist who you can't help but like, and a game that boasts a plethora of online multiplayer features in addition to its lengthy story mode. It's not without some flaws, but GTAIV is undoubtedly the best Grand Theft Auto yet.

One of the many things that set GTAIV apart from its predecessors is Liberty City, which is more convincing as a living, breathing urban environment than anything that you've seen in a game before, and bears little resemblance to its namesake in 2001's GTAIII. Liberty's diverse population believably attempts to go about its daily business, seemingly unaware that several criminal factions are at war in the city. Niko has no such luck. He's compelled to start working for one of the factions shortly after arriving, when he learns that his cousin Roman has some potentially fatal gambling debts. Niko's military experience makes him a useful freelancer for employers in the business of killing each other, and though his reluctance to carry out their orders is often apparent, he does whatever is asked of him in the hope that completing missions for other people will ultimately give him the means to complete his own.

Actually, Niko doesn't have to do everything that is asked of him. On several occasions as you play through his story, you'll be presented with decisions that afford you the option of doing what you think is right rather than blindly following instructions. You don't necessarily have to kill a target if he or she promises to disappear, but you have to weigh the risk of your employer finding out against the possibility that the person whose life you spare might prove useful later in the game, or even have work for you in the form of bonus missions. To say anything more specific on this subject would be to risk spoiling one of GTAIV's most interesting new features, but suffice it to say that every decision you make has consequences, and you'll likely want to play through the game at least twice to see how the alternatives unfold.

Grand Theft Auto IV's story mode can be beaten in less than 30 hours, and there are so many optional activities and side missions to take part in along the way that you can comfortably double that number if you're in no hurry. The majority of the story missions task you with making deliveries and/or killing people, and play out in much the same way as those in previous games. With that said, most of the missions are a lot easier this time around, partly because Niko is a more agile and efficient killer than any of his predecessors, and partly because the LCPD seemingly has better things to do than hunt down an illegal immigrant who's gunning down undesirables all over the city. Some of the more imaginative missions sprinkled throughout the story include a kidnapping, a bank heist, and a job interview. The cinematic cutscenes associated with story missions are superbly presented and are the sequences in which the game's characters really shine. Without exception, the characters you encounter benefit from great animation, great voice work, and superbly expressive faces. They're not always so impressive when they join you on a mission and refuse to do what they're supposed to (for example, not following you on an escort mission, or failing to negotiate a doorway). Nevertheless, these problems are few and far between, and they're made less painful by the new "replay mission" option that you're presented with whenever you fail.


New abilities in Niko's arsenal include scaling fences and walls anywhere he can get a foothold, shimmying along ledges, and, most importantly, taking cover behind objects. The ability to stick close to walls, parked cars, and the like at the touch of a button makes GTAIV's gunplay a huge improvement over that in previous games, and, in tandem with the new targeting system, it also makes it a lot easier. Enemies are rarely smart enough to get to you while you're in cover, and given that you can lock your targeting reticle on to them even when they're hidden, all you have to do is wait for them to poke their heads out and then pick them off with a minimum of effort. Locking on to enemies targets their torso by default, but you can use the right analog stick to fine-tune your aim and kill them more quickly with a headshot or two. Playing without using the lock-on feature make things more difficult, but you’ll need to master the technique so that you can shoot blindly at enemies from positions of cover when you dare not poke your own head out to line up the shot.

Given the amount of trouble that you get into as you play through the story mode, it's inevitable that the police are going to get involved from time to time, even when their presence isn't a scripted feature of your mission. Liberty City's boys in blue are quick to respond when you get flagged with a wanted level of between one and six stars, but they're not nearly as tough to deal with as their counterparts in previous GTA games. They don't drive as quickly when pursuing you, they rarely bother to set up roadblocks, and you'll need to blow up practically an entire city block before the FIB (that's not a typo) show up. Furthermore, you're given an unfair advantage in the form of your GPS system; when you're not using it to plot a valid route to any waypoint of your choosing, it doubles as a kind of police scanner. Any time you have a brush with the law, the GPS shows you the exact locations of patrol cars and cops on foot in your area, and highlights the circular area (centered on your last known whereabouts) where they're concentrating their search. To escape, all you need to do is move outside the circle and then avoid being seen for 10 seconds or so, which is often best achieved by finding a safe spot and just sitting there. It's not a bad system in theory, but in practice it makes dodging the law a little too easy, especially when your wanted level is low and the search area is small.


When you're not running missions for criminals, taking part in street races, stealing cars to order, or randomly causing trouble, you'll find that there are plenty of opportunities to unwind in Liberty City. Some of these optional activities offer tangible rewards that can prove useful in missions later on, whereas others are just a fun way to kill time and take in more of GTAIV's superb humor. For example, you can watch television, listen to numerous different radio stations, check out some genuinely funny shows (including some big-name acts) at cabaret and comedy clubs, and use a computer to surf the in-game Internet.

GTAIV's Internet is filled with spoofs of all the kinds of Web sites that you'd only ever look at accidentally or when you know there's no danger of getting caught. Some of them can be found only by clicking on links in spam e-mails, whereas others are advertised prominently on the search page. There's plenty of amusing stuff to find if you spend some time in one of the "TW@" Internet cafes, but the most interesting site by far is an online dating agency through which you can meet women who, if they like your profile, will agree to go on dates with you. Dating and socializing with friends is something you can spend as much or as little of your time doing as you like, and though the people you meet can occasionally be demanding to the point that they become irritating, keeping them happy invariably benefits you in some way.

Fable is back!

Most Western-developed role-playing games tend to follow an exhaustively mathematical, under-the-hood dice-rolling formula. This approach has left behind a trail of infinitely deep, intricately detail-oriented, but perhaps not so immediately enjoyable, games that garner critical accolades from the hardcore but leave the less-committed scratching their heads (see: Baldur's Gate, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion). Fable 2 is that rare Western-developed RPG that manages to innovate while remaining immediately playable to nearly anyone who picks up the controller. It's a game of choice, as established by its risk-taking but somewhat flawed predecessor, and this focus expands in the world of Fable 2 -- not only can you take the path of good or evil, but you can also choose someplace in between. How Fable 2 accommodates these decisions is found in the open-yet-focused world of Albion, a setting for people who like freedom -- in moderation.

Similar in scope to games like Oblivion, but not quite so vast that you ever feel lost, Fable 2 manages to strike a clear line between its primary quests and its side quests by detailing which is which in its menu system. If you ever become distracted by the need to make money (which you will) and get sidetracked by a job (bartending, blacksmithing, chopping wood, gambling, etc.) or a side quest, Fable 2 -- unlike some RPGs -- allows you to check up on your primary objectives and see what your quest status is, where you need to go, and what you've already accomplished. Getting to any quest is as simple as finding it in the menu and confirming that you want to teleport there (assuming you've discovered the region it's in). Of course, for people who prefer to do it the old-fashioned way, you can simply run from zone to zone while exploring and fighting along the way. The purely optional glowing "bread crumb trail," which always points you in the right direction, keeps you from getting waylaid. While it may sound like it makes things too easy, it's merely convenient -- especially when you're constantly roaming off the path to sniff out treasure chests and "dig spots" found by your faithful canine companion (more on him later). With treasure chests, dig spots, and even secret underwater areas in bubbling points scattered around ponds, oceans, and lakes, it could be really easy to get disoriented chasing after Fable 2's many temptations. So, simply put, the glowing trail is a real lifesaver, especially in underground caverns (which, while mostly linear, occasionally offer multiple paths to explore). This is probably the reason that Fable 2 ditches the tiny overhead map that fans of the original Fable will fondly remember. Now, if you want to check the area map, you need to pause the game to pull it up in the menu, which wouldn't be too bad if the menu screen wasn't so laggy. The glowing trail is useful in a lot of ways, but if you're simply trying to get your bearings and figure out where you are in relation to, oh, the barbershop, you'll soon wish you had a minimap in one of the unused upper corners of the screen. The sluggish menus also make simple tasks -- like using multiple status-enhancing potions in a row -- quite cumbersome, as you have to re-enter the menu system after using each item. This gets pretty annoying.

Menu gripes aside, another of Fable 2's big additions is the aforementioned pooch partner (who you can name -- and rename -- once you purchase a collar for him). Your pet is useful in a number of ways; the first and most obvious is that he's good at sniffing out treasure and dig spots (which, with a spade, results in more treasure). This might suggest that it takes the challenge out of finding free loot, but when you're dealing with Fable 2's lush, overgrown woodland areas, finding the lush, moss-covered treasure chests can be quite challenging. You can improve your dog's loot-finding abilities (as well as his ferociousness in combat) using training books. Interestingly, his A.I. is modeled after the creature A.I. in developer Lionhead's Black and White series, which explains why he's so...doglike...in mannerisms and behavior. The intention of all this puppy love: You really grow close to your dog, which carries greater ramifications deeper into the game. He's useful in other ways as well; depending on the type of collar you equip, he enhances certain combat capabilities. One collar may enhance your damage with ranged weapons while another collar raises your impact with Will spells. Other collars are just plain useless, yet they're worth investigating simply for the funny descriptions. In the end, while you may be mildly interested at first by the addition of the new A.I. canine partner, when you finally play the game, you'll realize just how invaluable he is.

The highly improved combat system is where Fable 2 really shines. It's glorious to behold, and this is where the game really separates itself from the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republics and the Legend of Zeldas of the day. Featuring excellent melee-combat mechanics and an initially awkward but eventually elegant five-tiered spell system, Fable 2 keeps its fights out of menus. The combat and magic work so well because they're carefully entwined. The magic system features five tiers, all controlled by holding down the B button to charge between the five tiers (the higher the tier, the longer the charge). By using these Will spells in tandem with melee attacks (a quick tap to activate a tier 1 Time Control area-of-effect slowdown paves the way for bullet time-style carnage with swords, ranged attacks, or even more magic), Fable 2's combat proves incredibly flexible -- and as customizable as every other facet of the game.

For those not interested in using Will powers, melee combat stands up on its own, too. In the areas of strength, skill, and speed -- each with multiple tiers and unlockable abilities (like evasive rolling, faster and more damaging melee/ranged attacks, and overall toughness/HP) -- you can go the purely physical route. And with the help of special "augments" (items that add status effects to weapons, such as HP drain, extra gold per kill, damage resistance, and, uh...beauty), you totally thrive in combat. That said, the most effective way to play is by using a deft blend of both disciplines. The lack of a mana bar makes Will powers much easier to use in Fable 2 than in the first game; instead of forcing the player to worry about MP management, the only cost for using Will is the time needed to charge up to the higher-tier spells. Enemy attacks don't interrupt your spell casting, so this keeps frustration to a minimum and encourages magic use in battle. You can still be interrupted if you're knocked down, but that happens maybe once in 10 spell casts, allowing you to experiment with this flexible and superbly designed magic system.

The script is clever, well written, and frequently hilarious. Even the most serious characters often punctuate their ominously intoned orations with things like "Friday is poker night," which sounds mundane on paper, but in the right place, it's a genuine laugh-out-loud moment. The consistently awesome voice acting really helps -- even the tiniest, inconsequential peons in the world of Albion are rich with character and wit, and for the primary characters, the voiceovers are peerless. Ron Glass (Shepherd Book from the Firefly television series) is an especially seasoned choice for the role of the neutrally-aligned hero, Garth, and he makes his character totally believable. Julia Sawalha (Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous) as Hammer, the monk aligned on the side of good, and Stephen Fry (Blackadder) as the sinister 'hero,' Reaver, are superb in their roles as well, making Fable 2 one of the best-acted videogames yet. All three are especially effective at channeling the three alignments your character can subscribe to (good, neutral, evil), adding real substance to the plot's subtleties.

The real question, though, is how well said alignment system works. In the first Fable, your actions dictated your appearance and how people around you reacted, which was fine (and quite entertaining). The game broke down, however, in the finale -- despite having played the game as an evil badass, you could basically undo all the damage by making the "right" decision in the final moments (ditto for good guys choosing the bad decision). These choices were kind of a cop-out, because if you chose the good ending (versus the bad path) -- in which you don't get to take the villain's sword -- you could get a similar one later anyway, negating the feeling of real sacrifice. Fable 2 is different; at game's end, you receive a number of choices -- not just "good" and "bad" -- and they affect you in ways you're not likely to forget...at least, not until you take a different path to see what unlocks on a subsequent playthrough. This makes for a more distinguished game, one that resonates more deeply. Don't choose one ending because you think that whatever rewards you sacrificed can be made up later -- make your decisions count. I can tell you that I was genuinely upset with my decision when I took the good route through the game and wish I'd taken another. Fortunately, Fable 2 doesn't end when you hit its surprisingly conflict-free and almost anticlimactic "ending." Naturally, it involves a twist...but once you complete the game's main quest, new quests open up, additional properties become available to purchase, and the world changes. Areas that were once dark and stormy are now rich with life; some areas benefit from subtle changes while others experience more dramatic shifts.

The paths you take are notable for their ease of difficulty, too. Being bad is definitely more fun because it's easier. You can steal money and intimidate people into lowering their prices just by looking scary. The downside is that evil characters don't seem to reap as many Will orbs, making it harder to get the really big spells for at least the first half of the game. Good has its rewards, of course (you get a halo by game's end), but it's also highly annoying. In order to get people to lower their prices (since you rarely have an excess of money), you have to shuck and jive for nearly every person that comes your way. Dancing and flexing and whistling and playing the lute for the increasingly huge crowds that gather to watch your one-man act results in people lowering their prices for you (even when buying real estate), but it also results in massive, headache-inducing entourages following your every move. Ever try to exit a tailor's shop when Beatlemania's going on right outside the doorway? It's a pain in the ass. Still, the way you play offers tangibly different experiences, so if that's what Lionhead was going for -- and they were -- then they've certainly achieved it.

But what Fable 2 adds, it also takes away. In what is probably the game's most disappointing element, you get far fewer clothing options (notably, heavy armor choices) than those found in the original, with the world's myriad clothing vendors and gypsies apparently buying their stock from the same warehouse. I'm not sure if Lionhead plans to offer additional wardrobe options as downloadable content, but the out-of-the-box variety is pretty slim. It's tough to even find a full suit of assassin's armor, as the body piece is the only one in sight. Those Demon Doors that offered loads of side quests and treasures to find? They were numerous in the first game, but in Fable 2, you only get nine, and the prizes behind each door vary in quality. The criteria for opening them are often ridiculous, too -- like giving a Demon Door some cheese. As you might expect, the prize that lies behind the cheese door is barely worth the minimal effort involved. Still, Fable 2 offers much more worthwhile quests to make up for it, although the overall weapon selection is about as limited as the clothing options.

Fable 2 also suffers from truly glitchy interface problems. You inspect things by pressing A near the appropriate object, like a house (to see what its price is) or an NPC (to interact with/buy things from them). So it's a real pain when pressing A doesn't result in the expected response, forcing you to position your character very specifically before the game reacts. Some doors occasionally don't even give you a response, leaving you wondering whether it's a multiplayer-specific door or just busted. The game also has some serious load times...which Lionhead obviously knew because the loading screens are filled with hilarious "overheard quotes" from the citizens of Albion to help pass the time. It makes me long for that Xbox Live update that allows for full hard-drive installs of any game -- because Fable 2 needs it. The overall level of polish, while much improved from the first game, is still a little bit rougher than most current-gen games out there, and it would be much more of an issue if the game wasn't so compelling. Fable 2's visuals are much more accomplished than, say, World of WarCraft (which is set in similarly themed locales), but compared to a Gears of War, it's nowhere close.

Which leads me to the multiplayer. Offline co-op play, to be blunt, is barely worth the time. It seemingly exists to provide an extra set of hands for a younger brother, a bored girlfriend, or a wife who complains that you play too many games. The characters are strictly limited to a default good/neutral/evil man or woman with limited customization (you can tweak only spells and melee abilities, these tweaks expire at the end of the play session). Basically, co-op's just for a buddy to tag along and check things out with no long-term investment. The real action was supposed to be in the online co-op mode, where two players would saddle up with their fully customized characters and hack their way through the game together. And while this hasn't been completely compromised in action, Lionhead -- in this instance -- again underdelivers on their original concept. Players hoping to play together online are restricted to A) the host player, who has his fully kitted-out character on display, and B) the guest player who -- again -- must select from the default set of six character types. What's in it for the guest character, then? By joining a game with your Xbox Live account, you're able to take all of the experience, money, and skills earned during your online play session and transfer it back to your own character once you're finished playing. So, basically, you're sending a proxy into another player's game world. In actual practice the camera is beyond your control most of the time, as even in online co-op both players must illogically share a single screen (instead of just having your own screen, like you would in an MMO), resulting in a perpetual tug-of-war. The whole appeal of playing together in a game like this is to show off your personal style. Remove that, toss in a nightmarish camera, and factor in the total lack of an online setup screen, lobby, or multiplayer interface and this is easily the worst thing about Fable 2. It's a painful example of lost opportunity -- it was supposed to be one of the best things about the game.

Lionhead needs to stop overpromising and underdelivering with this series. If it were simply a single-player RPG, Fable 2 would be an almost peerless entry in the genre. While the disastrous multiplayer doesn't detract from the overall awesomeness, it dilutes the impact somewhat. The time Lionhead spent forcing this mode into the game could've been better used to speed up the load times or add more varied loot. As it is, it's still the best RPG on the 360. It's a series worth evolving and expanding (can you imagine a Fable set in London around the time of Jack the Ripper -- boss material! -- where you play Jekyll or Hyde -- morality! -- cuz I can!). Fable 2 is filled with more great ideas than the last 10 years of Final Fantasy combined.

Saints Row 2...It's here!

If you want to talk about Saints Row 2 (right place to be, innit), you've got two different approaches open to you. You could talk, in technical terms and a tone reminiscent of a slightly disappointed maths teacher, about how the graphics aren't terribly impressive. It's got a huge city for you to explore, but compared with the deftly filtered visual richness of something like Grand Theft Auto IV (a comparison that's going to be hauled out a lot, I'm afraid), it looks dated.

You'd probably go on to mention, with faintly pursed lips, that the animation messes up regularly - with characters "popping" out of cars when the doors don't have space to open, for instance. Or you might complain that enemy AI and other road users are fairly simple and dim, or that the radio stations are understocked to the extent that the '80s station seems to play The Final Countdown at least three times an hour. If you want to nit-pick Saints Row 2, you won't have a hard time doing so. It's even got a little bit of screen-tearing and the occasional frame-rate drop.

If you look past that, though, you've got approach number two: it's the first sandbox game since Vice City where 3am comes and goes, and for me, Saints Row 2 is a diamond, no matter how roughly hewn. For all the visible seams, I'm happier talking about fun stuff, like the time I hijacked a car with a passenger still inside, and found myself playing a hidden mini-game where I had to evade the police without letting him escape, until he was so terrified that he offered to pay a ransom. Or the time I walked into a stadium to discover a fully functional Destruction Derby, complete with customisable scrapyard vehicles.

Does this look a) ridiculous and unrealistic or b) really good fun?

It's a game that wears its heart on its sleeve. It's a blatant rip-off of GTA's central idea, but the idea has been ripped off by people who understand that what made GTA fantastic wasn't just stealing cars and thumping people, but humour and character. Saints Row 2 is full of memorable gang bosses and underlings, teeming with sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek or simply puerile comments and references.

Moreover, it's hosted a city rich with activity. Every street is full of shops to be explored, activities to take part in, missions to be defeated and enemy strongholds to conquer. From the first moment you set foot in Stilwater (after breaking out of the prison you've languished in since the first game), your map throbs with dozens of icons, each of which can be explored to turn up something new. Even if you're not right next to a mission or activity icon (missions advance the storyline, activities simply earn you money and "respect", which unlocks additional missions), the game rarely leaves you with nothing to do for long, and of course you can always embark on the standard GTA-style crime spree - shoot things until the cops (and rival gangs) turn up, escalating to the point where SWAT vans block off the roads and helicopters circle overhead.

If you're still running with 'ridiculous and unrealistic', Saints Row 2 may not be the game for you.

There's extra structure on offer here, though. Hijack a taxi and you get a Crazy Taxi-style game - pick up passengers, deliver them on time, and drive according to their desires to receive a bonus. A tow-truck allows you to repossess cars from (usually violent) owners to earn money. As mentioned, stealing a car with a passenger in it and putting your foot down enables a ransom mini-game. Several days since we began, we're not convinced we've turned up all the distractions on offer, with so many incidental features - like your character singing along to the songs on the radio if you leave it on long enough. Tunelessly and out of time, we might add, but that just makes it even better.

While Saints Row 2 makes no bones about its GTA inspiration, one crucial difference is the concept of territory, with the city of Stilwater divided up into 45 discrete neighbourhoods, which are controlled by an assortment of rival gangs. As you progress through the missions, some of those neighbourhoods come under your control. Others you'll have to take over by assaulting enemy strongholds.

If you want to talk about Saints Row 2 (right place to be, innit), you've got two different approaches open to you. You could talk, in technical terms and a tone reminis