Brutal Legend for the X-Box 360 is an interesting hybrid of action adventure mixed with Real-Time-Strategy similar to the Overlord series. Like Overlord, you are in command of the main character and act as a general to your forces while roaming the battlefield with a melee weapon. You can slash, use magic, or you can just sit back and let your lackeys do the fighting for you. Both games also offer colorful and lush environments along with humorous dialogue.

Unlike Overlord, in Brutal Legend, your main character has a voice and personality which makes him far more interesting. The world is also much more open, and the means by which you explore it far more fun. I spent over an hour doing nothing but driving around in my car, boosting off jumps and running over wildlife. Not to mention that you can listen to heavy metal music the entire time while doing it.

The story is rather goofy and ridiculous: you play as the world’s greatest roadie Eddie Riggs who gets sent back in time to a world where car engines are dug out of the ground and there are mountains of speakers. Your melee units are a bunch of head bangers with overdeveloped neck muscles. You also run into a number of rock’n role legends like Ozzy Osbourne, but it all fits with the feel of the game which is modeled after every heavy metal CD cover you ever saw. Unfortunately there are some continuity errors in the story. On a few occasions Eddie seems to get some off screen exposition and know things that he shouldn’t, and those moments are rather confusing.

The game starts out as a hack and slash adventure with Eddie running around chopping people up with an ax and electrocuting them with a magic guitar. You try to help the local prince raise an army against the big-haired bad guy, and then the game throws in an RTS element that feels almost like a minigame. You have a stage as your spawn point and tap “fans” as a resource by playing a guitar solo which feels like Guitar Hero on a game controller. You run around the field, ordering up new units and telling them what to kill. The controls for this part of the game are both simple and complicated at the same time. You can order nearby units around with the press of a button, and there are four basic commands to give: attack, follow, or stay. This is all fine when all you want is to send every unit over to a tower and tear it down. The problem is with the strategy part of the real-time-strategy. In order to select a single unit type for a certain job, you have to highlight an area you want them to go, then you have to walk over to one of that unit, click a different button and hold it down, then give the command. It may not sound too difficult but in the middle of a fight it is a real pain to pull off. It’s much easier to do a double team which is a move that allows you to take direct control of any of your units.

These strategy sections only occur during certain points of the story and do not exist in the free play mode, but it is the basis of the mutli player, and it is very hard to make a comeback during these matches if you make a mistake. If you and your army are destroyed, you return to your stage where you must then order up another army, but the units spawn one at a time with a build delay for each, so by the time you have a new army the enemy has marched across the field, destroyed all your resource gathering booths and build their own, and are now ambushing you at your spawn point.

Another problem is that the game’s story mode is very short, only about five hours long if you know what you’re doing. I feel that this is almost tragic because the story, despite being rather silly at times, seemed to have much more potential than this. A race of demons oppress humanity and you have to overthrow them, but you never get to see the demons’ lands. Instead they pay a visit to yours for awhile, and you hang around some creepy scenery, but it belongs to the zombie humans called Tear Drinkers representing the Goth/Death metal crowd. Even with the side missions, some of which are very repetitive, you can clear this game in a single day easily.

This game was partially developed by Jack Black, and although I’m not a fan of him as an actor he did manage to do a somewhat decent job voicing Eddie Riggs in this game. His over the top attempts at being cool do show up a few times. In fact much of this game feels more like what Jack Black thinks heavy metal is about in a very immature teenager sort of way, but it is still a fun game to play as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

There isn’t much replay value to this game as far as redoing the story from the beginning because the game can’t support more than one save file at a time like Ghost Busters which is rather annoying. But there is much fun to be had just driving around the world trying to find all the hidden bound dragons of which there are over a hundred scattered around. You can also unlock new songs to listen to on your radio, buy upgrades for your car and yourself, and just drive around and take in the scenery. Some of the areas in this world of metal are truly breathtaking.

If you’re a fan of the Overlord series, or of heavy metal and rock’n roll, you should definitely give this game a look. Just make sure you don’t turn off the gore or profanity near the start of the game, they handled the censoring very, very badly.

Final Fantasy series continues to stick to their turn based battles in this day and age, and quite frankly, I think everyone is bored of them.  The turn based system was created during the NES days because that was the easiest way to create an RPG back then.  The didn’t have the graphical power to have real time battles on the NES or SNES.  But the wonders of technology has improved the capabilities of what games can do, and I think it is just silly to see such an outdated, prehistoric system like turn based systems continue in current gen videogames.  What worked in the early 90’s feels bland and boring now.

The character designs in Final Fantasy games are so generic and boring too.  It’s your cliche, spikey or long hair dudes meeting with other long haired or spikey haired dudes.  People want to treat these character designs like they are something special, but the only reason you treat them special is because you’ve grown attached to them after playing the videogames.  If you laid any Square Enix character design on the table next to other generic anime artwork from other studios, you’ll see there is nothing special about Square’s artwork.  Just more cliche anime stereotypical bullcrap.

People ask if I’m looking forward to the new Final Fantasy.  What’s there to look forward to?  I’ve already played it.  The new Final Fantasy’s graphics is PS3/Xbox 360 and its gameplay is NES/Super Nintendo.  Seriously, the turnbased gameplay has not evolved since NES/SNES.  When Nintendo brought out Zelda and Mario on Nintendo 64, it wasn’t just 3D graphics.  No, they took the 2D gameplay of those games and tried to translate them to a 3D world.  Final Fantasy on the other hand, the only thing 3D about the game is the graphics and animation.  But the game isn’t 3D.  Pressing X once to make your character attack while this automated animation of him attacking an enemy is not fun.  And then waiting, while 10 different enemies have to TAKE TURNS to attack your character is not fun.  So you basically sit there and wait your turn while creatures are ripping you apart.  There isn’t a lot of strategy to this.  What is the strategy in waiting your turn to attack your enemies?  The only strategy is you need to get 100 of those “pick me up” thingys where you can bring your other characters back to life if they die.

The storylines in Final Fantasy games are overrated.  Ever notice that people rarely talk about the stories in Final Fantasy games except for Final Fantasy 7.  And the only thing anyone ever seems to remember from FF7 is that some female character died.  The game was like 3 CD’s long, and all people ever talk about was how shocked that this female character died.  You barely hear them talk about the other characters.  Final Fantasy 8 was like 4 cd’s long, and nobody ever talks about that game’s story.  That’s funny because Final Fantasy fans always talk about the stories being what drives them to play the games. 

I shouldn’t even call them games though.  I mean lets think about it.  The only reason Squaresoft left Nintendo to make games on PS1 was to put CGI movies on their games.  Final Fantasy games are basically 40 percent gaming and 60 percent movie.  Squaresoft is so obsessed with making movies that they’ve made 2 or 3 Final Fantasy movies.  Honestly, maybe Square should just leave games and just make movies if they want to make movies so bad.  Oh wait, even with movies they fail.  The movie critics always pan them. 

The only good thing about the Final Fantasy games is the music because the music does a great job of manipulating you into feeling like you’re playing something more epic than it actually is.  The only music Squaresoft is hearing is cash registers ringing up whenever suckers continue to rebuy ports of old Final fantasy games they already own on Nintendo DS or PSN. 

There are plenty of RPG’s with good gameplay and great storylines.  And they won’t put me through 10 hours of watching cutscenes.  If I wanted to watch a movie, I would watch a movie.  I didn’t buy a videogame to watch 3D Anime.  But maybe the hardcore Final Fantasy fans did because they assumed there would be some hentai in the cutscenes.

Margaret Weis Productions

Written by Jamie Chambers, based on the television series by Eric Kripke.

35 page PDF, available free from www.rpgnow.com and elsewhere.

The Hunt Begins is an introductory kit for the Supernatural RPG from Margaret Weis Productions, which also holds the license for the Serenity RPG. Margaret Weis is a longstanding and well-respected name in the industry (dating back to the Dragonlance series of games and books) and it will be interesting to see whether this business model proves successful – there are numerous games which could be used to recreate a Supernatural-like game and one wonders who will is intended to be the target market for this system. Presumably it will be fans of the Supernatural TV show who might be lured into RPG playing through seeing the opportunity of playing their heroes (or playing with them, in the case of some fanfic writers). This poses something of a conundrum for writers and game designers who wish to hold the interest of the more serious gamer by providing a full range of 21st century RPG design technology while not putting off the newcomer with jargon and complexity. I hope it all works out for them (I collect my salary for teaching business so of course I hope everyone is successful, preferably after an extensive and expensive education).

Many people will be familiar with the Supernatural show, which at the time of writing is just entering into its fifth and presumably final series. It focuses on two young men, brothers, named Sam and Dean Winchester who follow their father into the family business of ending the existence of all kinds of monsters, beasties and ghoulies that litter mainland USA (Dean has a fear of flying and the show makes much use of the iconic car in which the brothers customarily travel). As the show has progressed, Sam and Dean have leveled up and found themselves able to kill increasingly powerful creatures, including a variety of demons. As the fifth series begins, they are set to confront Lucifer, who has risen from his ancient prison largely because the boys screwed up their previous campaign. The early shows had a fairly formulaic but successful format reminiscent of early X-Files before all that silly alien abduction stuff took over. In this format, the attention of the brothers would be drawn to the manifestation of a supernatural creature and they drive to the nearby town in the car, a 1967 Impala for those who care about such things, all the while pumping out at loud volume selections from Dean’s execrable music taste, as inherited from his father (Carry on, my wayward son indeed). Once in the town, they do a bit of ‘research,’ masquerade as FBI agents, priests or some other trusted individuals until such time as they are ready to confront the ghost, ghoul or werewolf, which they then use violence or occult knowledge or both to destroy. All the while, they stay in a succession of fairly grim motels and try to enliven their lives with junk food and possibly exploitative relationships with young women more or less desperate to escape the dreary mundane misery of small town America. So, a few jokes, some recurring minor characters, a lot of creative destruction and the progress towards the boss monster at the end of the level/series and there you are. This format continued until the fourth series, when the overarching Lucifer plot took centre stage (although there was still space for some jokey standalone episodes to be slipped in to the schedule, which is something quite impossible for British programs which have much shorter runs and aim, not always successfully, to make every minute count). No doubt Wikipedia or some such similar site has a list of all the episodes and events for players who need more information or inspiration.

So, in The Hunt Begins, we are introduced to the Cortex system (a proprietorial RPG system of the production company) and encouraged to form a new group of hunters to participate in the introductory scenario, “Of Wolf and Man,” about which all that really needs to be said can be guessed from the title. The Cortex system involves a range of different types of dice that RPG players will already own but newcomers presumably will not and the usual set of attributes, traits, abilities and so forth. Tasks are allotted a target number and characters must reach this with the dice they have allocated to the relevant score and any bonuses that might apply. There is scope for botching the roll and some guidance for combat and so forth. An example of play is provided for those who might benefit from such a thing.

No RPG rules system is perfect, of course: there are so many these days and they tend to include the kinds of features that the Cortex system involves. One problem of the approach is that players try to use the attribute or trait or special ability in which they might have specialized in order to achieve any particular objective. Since games designers these days have become as generous as the organizers of the kind of sports day for six year olds which are planned to make everyone to feel good about their personal prowess and in which everyone receives an equally valuable prize, this means every character is likely to pass every target all the time and it becomes frustrating and surprising to fail – at least for experienced players. It’s all a far cry from the early days of Traveller, for example, when it became something of an achievement just to survive character generation without death or major, crippling injury. I blame Oprah.

Players are encouraged to use role-playing by being awarded ‘plot points’ which can be used for second chances at dice throwing or some other benefit in play. In a group of players ready and able to work with each other at role-playing, this can be quite effective. Then again, it is possible to say that about any group – good play transcends the rules generally speaking.

Is it possible to create a satisfying feeling of horror when playing the game? Again, the answer depends on the group and its interaction to a significant extent. There do not seem to be any innovative features such as the loss of humanity mechanism for vampires that might promote consideration of the tropes of the genre (although I have not of course seen the full version of the game). Creating the wise-cracking, vaguely misogynistic feeling of the show would not be too difficult but the combat-heavy resolution of most of the early episodes might lead to a reductionist approach at the table (I roll, I miss; monster rolls, monster hits you etc). In these cases, there is a need for a skilful GM to lend the necessary colour to the scene.

On the whole, this is a professionally produced game that deserves some success and, best of all, is not overrun with needless internal illustrations. Let’s see if it resonates with the public – marketing issues (e.g. distribution, personal selling, point-of-sales support and so forth) are likely to be influential here. Perhaps Sam and Dean can be induced to permit a little product placement.

Become a fan of Heros of Newerth on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/heroesofnewerth

Step 2

Click on the Discussions tab

Step 3

You can look through all the discussions, most will probably help you get a free beta key. The discussion that I read and followed was FREE BETA KEYS GIVEAWAY, by Evgenij All.

The Method I Used

I got my free beta key by completing a few steps which were worth the free key. The person giving out the beta keys owns a social networking site (www.VK.com), and in compensation of joining his social networking site, Evgenij would email the beta key within a half hour (all you had to do was sign up, and email him with a link to the profile, your name and email address). He was true to his word and I received the beta key no more than an hour after creating a profile on his social networking site. It isn’t a scam or anything, it’s an actual social networking site, very similar to Facebook in it’s layout. 

Good Luck

I hope this method works out for you, or that you can find another method in the discussions on the Facebook page of Heros of Newerth. If you find any other good methods, why not post them in the comments so others can benefit too? Don’t post any scams or fraudulent links, I will delete those immediately. Thanks!

As any gamer worth his salt is aware, Modern Warfare 2 has hit the shelves and it didn’t stay there long. Wives and girlfriends have been mourning the loss of their men to the new first person shooter and with good reason.

The game has been receiving pretty good reviews across the board and, up until now, everything was going well with the launch. I did hear one report of the police being called because of the sound of gunfire, but I don’t really think we can blame that on anyone but paranoid neighbours.

The PS3 players have been unable to play the multiplayer version of the game because of a networking problem by Demonware, How long do they think the average gamer spends on the single player of a FPS? You need the first level to get used to that controls. After that the story line may as well be about coke addicted dragons for all anyone cares.

Demonware, an Irish based networking company, were meant to be handling the PS3’s Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer servers but a day after the launch the servers are already down and they’re feeling the heat from Activision.

It’s being reported that there is no programming error with the servers themselves, they were just not prepared for the traffic. Apparently, Demonware don’t read a lot of gamer forums. Even my mother, and this is saying something, new about Modern Warfare 2 coming out.

More bandwidth is to be added to the servers and they should be coming back online gradually. There may be some smaller problems while they add more to it but the majority of the playerbase should be fine. The PS3 owners will no doubt forget their anger when they finally get back into the fray.

Something tells me that Demonware won’t be getting of the hook that easily though. For the launch of Modern Warfare 2 to be this badly planned? That’s not going to go down well. When your audience is de-sensitized from violent games and have the taste of blood from their short encounter with the single player campaign? It’s a bad idea to anger them.

The game is based upon an imaginary war between the US and Russia.  The player acts as either an American or British soldier taking on missions.  It’s a first-person shooter game.  The game can be played individually or with a multi-player online function.  It is the sixth game in the Call of Duty series.  It’s a direct sequel to the fourth in the set Call of Duty:  Modern Warfare.   

The graphics in the game are excellent.  In fact, they are so good that it’s shocking, literally.  Today’s games are a far cry from games of the past.  In the early days of video games, a “bad guy” being shot looked like a stick falling onto the ground.  If the “bad guy” was laying on the ground, he was dead.  It was understood.  Today, in a number of video games including the new Call of Duty, a dead “bad guy” looks, well, startlingly dead.  He’s laying in a pool of blood and there’s a very realistic atmosphere to it.  Additionally, people are playing them on high-definition TVs with surround sound.  It creates a dream situation for gamers.  Unfortunately, it intensifies it for opposers. 

Far and away, the single most controversial episode in the game involves an airport scene where the player has to decide whether or not they want to participate in a mass killing to keep their cover with a Russian terrorist group.  The victims are civilians in an airport terminal.  Many people in both the public and the media are outraged by the scene, claiming it to be disgustingly violent and trivialising terrorism.  Some went as far as accusing that the scene was added specifically to create controversy.  Controversial games are reported in the media, thereby garnering free publicity. 

On the other hand, the game contains a special warning prior to the player entering this scene.  Also, there is an option which allows it to be skipped altogether.  Video game creators are caught between a rock and a hard place, to an extent.  Adding scenes such as this one are bound to disturb and anger some people.  Excluding the same scenes can leave some purchasers asking for more and feeling cheated by the game.  If Call of Duty decided against using this scene and taming down the game, it is possible that they could lose part of their fan-base which craves this type of entertainment.  Their competitors are certainly creating equally graphic and inhumane scenes.  Anyone who’s played the latest Grand Theft Auto can confirm.    

The game itself carries a warning label, too, on the outside of the box.  It’s rated M for mature which means that persons under the age of 17 are not allowed to buy the game.  At 18 years of age, some of the boys playing the game could be living through similar scenarios in real life with a military career.  Label ratings are enforced by the video game industry as a whole, but it’s an impossible task, when the purchasing is done by the parents.  A number of the parents buying this game and others like it are oblivious to its content.  This simply cannot be blamed on the video game or its manufacturer. 

Defenders claim:  it’s fictional and equivalent to watching a gory movie, it contains warning labels, it is adult entertainment and adults are free to choose what they want to play.  Opposers claim:  it is unnecessarily violent, it is much more involved than simply watching a movie, it creates a virtual world where rules that apply in reality are not adhered to, sending poor messages to both children and adult players.  It seems to me that everyone is right.  It is unnecessarily violent, but it is adult entertainment.  If you don’t like it, then don’t participate.  If you don’t want your kids to play, don’t buy it, although no one is with their kids 24/7 and they probably would play at a friend’s house. 

Perhaps the true problem lies in the old adage:  Ignorance is bliss.  When I was a kid and the “bad guys” fell to the ground, me and my friends thought it was great.  We had no idea that one day there would be high-tech games like this on the market.  We were content with what was available.  As computer technology expands, each new game on the market is going to have better graphics and more realistic surroundings.  The gaming companies will continually try to one-up each other with different scenarios and storylines.  The fact is that the Atari days are long gone and it’s only going to continue in the direction it’s going, like it or not, especially when the companies involved are making $310 million dollars in a single day.

This game is every conspiracy theorist’s wet dream turned into a first person shooter. It’s Doom meets the X-files, complete with David Duchovny as the main character. In this game you play as some kind of colorfully armored biohazard responder at area 51 where, surprise surprise, alien monsters are running amok. Apparently some super-scientist has let one of the genetic monsters loose in the base, and it’s spreading a virus that infects humans, turning them into more monsters, so in that respect it’s similar to Resident Evil. You start out with a team of buddies that are unkillable, when their not in a cut scene, who like to joke around. These guys make the first part of the game easy which is good because it gives you a chance to get used to the controls. You can just hang back, saving your ammo, while your invincible friends do the fighting. Predictably your teammates are killed off by a very big monster that you know is going to be a boss later on which officially ends the tutorial section. You get your butt kicked and end up infected with the virus. This is where the game gets both fun and trippy as you enter “monster vision” and run around killing fellow monsters and strange soldiers with your claws and weird tendril things you shoot out of your hands which restore your health. You start hearing voices and begin transforming back and forth between a human and a monster as you seek out a cure to the virus, and a means of escape from the base.

The weapons in this game are few, but varied. You start out with a pistol and soon get a rifle. You get grenades, a shot gun, and later on a few alien weapons including a rocket launcher which has very little ammo and a strange energy gun which can bounce off of walls to get enemies behind cover. You also get a few chances to mount some kind of weapon platforms and mow down enemies as they pour out at you.

The levels are all pretty interesting and add to the atmosphere of mystery and paranoia. You check out weapon testing areas, dissected alien space crafts, and even the studio where they filmed the moon landing. To add to the sense of just what goes on at area 51, you can collect little bits of information by scanning it with your wrist gauntlet. This gives you information on oddities that you find, as well as scan in notes and files that will wet your conspiratorial appetites. If you get all of the items in a level, you unlock a short video segment in which one of the two scientists you meet in the game talk about their mad experiments.

Of course every game has its flaws, and area 51 is no exception. For starters the story is confusing to say the least. Even after beating it several times, I’m still not to clear on what’s going on in this game. There’s no real explanation as to why you have control of yourself after being infected by the virus when no one else does. You do get partially disinfected at a point, but up until then the only reason I can think of is the creepy alien who communicates with you every now and again having something to do with it. The entire crisis started when one of the scientists intentionally released one of the mutant monsters in the facility, but didn‘t try to leave himself, all to get revenge on the organization. I guess you could just say that he is crazy to potentially endanger the entire human race like this, but he‘s supposed to be brilliant and it seems like a really stupid thing to do in my book. The game also introduces characters with out any real explanation of what’s going on. You run into another hazmat team, a giant alien in a jar, uninfected people still in the place. And there isn’t really any reason for the government to send in a four man hazard team into a facility the size of a city overrun with mutant monsters that want to kill us.

Another problem is repetition. Although some of the alien weapons are neat, you won’t get them until much later in the game, and will mostly use the guns you get on the second level: riffle and a shotgun. There isn’t much variety to the enemies in this game either. The first levels consist of infected people and head crabs. Latter on you run into more interesting creatures and black ops fellows, but once you go mutant, you can usually tear these guys apart pretty easily. In the last few levels you run into the grey aliens who hide behind a shield while producing black ops guys to attack you until you kill them

Still, area 51 is a good rental for any X files fan. The level designs are clever and immersive, and all the little tidbits give you a feeling of, “this is the stuff they don’t want me to know.” it’s only real replay value is in finding all of the hidden items to scan, or to try and make better sense of the plot.

The goal of the game is to get a five star park. As your popularity increases, you can unlock a new dig-site to access three new dinosaur species. Unfortunately you can only unlock 3 dig sites out of nine, and the first one is predetermined by the game. Each dig-site unlocks 3 dinosaur species, so you are limited to nine species of dinosaurs for your park. This problem is amplified by the fact that you can only have a set number of dinosaurs in the park at any given time, and they can’t breed. This is because they are all female which is from the movie, but it is a bit of a headache to have to constantly replenish your supply of animals manually. Even in the alternate game mode, site B in which there is no park, you have to constantly create dinosaurs manually rather than try to create a balanced ecosystem between predators and prey, which I think would have been a very interesting game mechanic.

Better dinosaurs attract more people which makes your park more popular. You also have to deal with keeping your park clean, and animals healthy which can be a chore until you research auto immunization and all the vaccines. Otherwise your animals become sick and you have to select them and order your helicopter to cure them, if you have the cure researched. Another constant hassle is the weather. It changes between seasons, but none of it really affects you other than the tornadoes which tear through your park, kill animals and people, and damage your buildings. This can be very annoying if you just spent a fortune on a pack of raptors only to have them sucked up to the land of OZ. Another frustration is when one of your animals goes on a rampage. This happens in the raptors so often I’m convinced it’s a glitch. This happens when your animals become stressed, they go crazy, kill any nearby animals, and destroy the fence. If you don’t react quickly they will eat the guests before they collapse and die.

The game does have a few other game modes in which you either take certain photographs from a jeep, kill rampaging beasts from a helicopter, or muster a herd of herbivores with a helicopter. There are also a few special parks in which you have a specific goal to meet such as get a good rating within a time limit or get a photo worth a certain amount of points. Despite all of this, the game only really comes down to doing one of two things: either breeding a bunch of carnivores and letting them loose to eat your visitors, or to zoom in on your favorite dinosaur and watch it like a peaceful nature show. Actually playing the game to make a five star park seems a pointless and unrewarding chore. Once you’ve unlocked the three dig sites you’ve chosen and bred all nine dinosaurs, there’s really no incentive to get a five star rating. There is also a limit to everything you can build which further limits your options.

This isn’t an exciting action game, and I can only really recommend it for dinosaur fans such as myself who can enjoy watching dinosaurs just walking around and grazing. The game does have a very relaxing soundtrack, and this game can put you to sleep if you let it.

That’s all there is to it, to be honest. The gameplay is almost identical to previous Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, save for perhaps a few more unlockable items (in the form of photos, videos and tracks concerning the band’s career). Guitar Hero’s “Star Power” is replaced by “Beatle Mania” but it works in the same way and the system for the star ratings is easier to see but exposes itself as being as flawed as the points system (the cumulative multipliers still ensure that you’re more likely to score highly if you cock up in earlier in a song than later). The graphics are a little improved, with enough detailing on the band’s faces to see who’s who in an endearingly stylised way with some nice changes over time as they age, and there are some fabulous cut scenes and psychedelic backgrounds to ensure the visuals maintain the same charm as the music. In fact sometimes the visuals are too much: one can’t very easily play and watch the pretty pictures at the same time, but presumably these are added more for the game’s capacity as a party game than for solo enjoyment, giving others in the room something to watch. The resulting experience is a little bit like playing through both the “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Yellow Submarine” films but without the humour, sometimes leaving me pining for the films themselves.

Unfortunately all these pretty extras come at a cost: the story mode is criminally short with only 45 songs to play (compared with the 80 or so on similar recent titles), and though the decision to group songs chronologically rather than by difficulty is cute but ensures that most of the songs are pretty easy, leaving no learning curve. The different difficulties could have made up for this if they weren’t so disparate: Medium is uniformly easy, hard is uniformly hard. So does the rest of the game make up for it? Well almost. Of course if you like the general format and you like the Beatles, you’re going to enjoy it, even I’ll admit it’s a lot of fun, but it’s also more than a little disappointing. The short soundtrack means that lots of real classics are removed: Help, Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields Forever and All You Need is Love, among others, are missing, despite the latter being referenced a dozen times in the cut scenes and unlockables. Presumably these will appear on downloadable content eventually, for those willing to spend even more money on tracks that are already in their CD collections. In terms of Beatles history it’s also heavily sanitised, early band members are neatly omitted, for example, so purist are likely to be disappointed too. To keep players going, the game throws in achievements awards for anything and everything, from calibrating your machine to playing bass left handed, though there seems to be some faults in the achievement system: my copy would award me for things I hadn’t done on some occasions and on others would award me with nameless achievements, though I can’t tell whether this was a problem with my copy alone or with the game’s design.

It may not be quite the sublime experience suggested by title, but it’s still a very enjoyable game, a brilliant concept strengthened by some stunning visuals, and if you’re not smiling as you strum through “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, “I Am the Walrus” and “Dear Prudence” there’s something very wrong with you.

Image via CrunchBase

            It started out simply enough.  The facebook thing I mean.  It was peer pressure, I swear!  My friends kept telling me to get on facebook, and so I did.  Sometimes I like to fit in, and besides, I like to know what’s going on with my friends and family without the inconvenience of having to actually talk to them on the phone or in person.  (confessions of a hermit)  This is when I noticed a phenomenon in the upper right hand corner of the screen, they were invitations!

            I felt a little weird about being super poked, and even weirder about super poking, so that application went the way of the dodo for me.  I only wish that others had done this as well.  Instead, somewhere between writing unique and interesting facebook status (or would it be stati) I became entangled in a snarl of facebook games that have completely taken over my life.  At the time the obsession had driven me to check facebook every hour.  Yes!  Every hour!

            My first addiction was Mob Wars.  (http://apps.facebook.com/mobwars/)  It intrigued me.  I didn’t need the finger and thumb coordination that is required for a Xbox or Playstation, nor any of the strange coordination needed to master the Wii.  I simply needed to point and click.  Click.  I mugged some one.  Click.  I robbed a liquor store.  Click.  I heisted a train.  It was empowering.  Then I discovered fights.  I could fight with guns and cars and body armor…and I could kill!  Yes!  Not something allowed in day to day life.  And now, I just can’t give the game up because where else will I ever make 400 million dollars an hour?  *sigh*

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

            Then came Mafia wars.  And any addict who is truly honest with themselves knows that Mafia wars is exactly the same as Mob Wars just with different graphics.  But I wasn’t done there!  No!  Soon I had an apartment inYoville and a farm in Farmville.  I was trying to make my way through the city of ash and defending a castle in some other game.  I was a member of the special forces.  I say was, but let’s face it, I still am.

           I’m not sure what these application designers have done to sucker me in, but as I watch all the friends on my friends list spiral into the same traps I have, I’m not feeling so bad.  I only wish that I had the talent and time to design a facebook game of my own.  If you read this, have the ability, and take this idea and run with it.  Please remember me should it become a lucrative venture.

            I suggest a new game called Farm Wars.  In this game every simple and pure act of farming is laced with the terror and danger of the Mafia.  Missions would include stabbing the neighbor farmer with a pitchfork and stealing their hay so that your cows will produce 12% faster, robbing the feed mill of fertilizer so you can feed your crops AND build a bomb to use on your neighbors barn, and Bombing the neighbors barn to ensure you receive first place at the farm show with the pig you pilfered before the big blast earning you extra coins to buy the big tractor mounted with a mini gun so that you can blow away any live stock remaining next door.  Really, I think I have something here.

            So if you’re addicted to Facebook games, drop a comment below letting me and anyone else who reads this know which game you think is the best.