Video games get sequels all the time. We’re near-constantly being beaten around the head with them. Yet, there are few video games that prompt more feverish excitement amongst fans than the Resident Evil series, so let’s have a gander at the trailer for Resident Evil 6 shall we?

The uneducated will confuse this with the trailer for some dreadful Underworld-style actual film, but hardcore Resident Evil fans will be simultaneously excited and dismayed by the teasers for ‘the gaming experience of 2012’ (ie: ‘the gaming experience of four hours of 2012 so they can be the first to post a review on gamefaqs.com’).

Use your bleary, bloodshot eyes to watch the trailer and read our jokes over the jump:

0:11 Oh God it’s Leon from Resident Evils 2 and 4. And he’s still not ditched the whole emo/military thing. Get a haircut Leon.

0:39 The president of the United States informs Leon what a great relationship they have. HE’S JUST LIKE JACK BAUER. Hang on though. Bloody hell, Leon and his hair have now shot the president of the United States. Some random woman is involved. Crackers. This isn’t like 24 at all.

1:11 “90% of the population of Tall Oaks have been infected with the virus. That runs at about 70,000 hostiles.” Says some woman in a Situation Room.

“Yeah, this is Raccoon City all over again.” Says Leon and his hair.

No, this is Resident Evil 2 all over again. Resident Evil 2 was not a good game. Bugger.

1:29 The action has transferred to Japan! Because the Japan bit was the best bit of The Dark Knight! (The Japan bit was not the best bit of The Dark Knight. It wasn’t even in Japan! It was Hong Kong! Pay attention, Capcom!) It’s got Chris Redfield from the first Resident Evil in it! He’s part of some sort of Alpha Team. Oh dear. Fans of the series will know that being part of an Alpha Team is like wearing being beamed down to a planet in Star Trek wearing a red shirt.

2:06 Yeah, Alpha Team seem to meet some terrible grief. Involving Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 by the look. The one no-one enjoyed. Yawn.

2:16 Oh no. Surely not. The squeaky voice… yes, it’s Ashley from Resident Evil 4. Massively annoying, complains-if-you-look-up-her-skirt, only-useful-for-crawling-through-the-very-few0obviously-placed-confined-spaces-in-the-whole-game Ashley. “The world needs you!” She squeaks. Monumentally tiresome Ashley.

2:40 Chris Redfield in full effect! He nearly says “Bitch” but it’s edited. A young male colleague warns him against a “personal vendetta” like he’s Chase Edmunds out of series 3 of 24 or something. And we all know what happened to him. Rumours that you get to chop the cocky little bastard’s hand off yourself are currently unconfirmed by Capcom.

2:47 onwards. Standard scenes to be honest. This viewer could be watching any trailer for anything at all.

Oh do you know what? It’ll be like this – abysmal control system as always, inability to run whilst shooting as always, co-op throughout that no-one wants (even in single player), bunch of hardcore fans going all “it’s not even a Resident Evil game, I liked it when it wasn’t fully-rendered 3D and you had to wait 30 seconds for a door to open on the Dreamcast so the next bunch of gloomy corridors and rooms could load” and otherwise it’ll be brilliant.

Enjoy. Or don’t.

The Grand Theft Auto series is like a biblical dynasty, with more and more versions being released on what seems like an almost daily basis. Before long we’ll be able to chart our lives by where we are when the new GTA was released.

Like how the elderly chart theirs by when JFK or Elvis died, or One Direction fans will when Harry Styles finally succumbs to hairspray poisoning and he’s found slumped over Caroline Flack’s riddled corpse, herself only recently imploded under her own sense of self worth.

Well before that happy occasion arrives, you can all just shut up and read our brilliant and totally 100% correct in every which way review of Grand Theft Auto 3 for iOS and even some Android phones.

Although not a new offering from the Rockstar laboratories of prostitute haters, it is the newest of the franchise to reach the imaginary cyber-shelves of the App Store and has even been tinkered with to make the most of the new technologies that weren’t available back in the day, and which we can’t profess to know anything about. Get off our back, we can name all the Kardashians in order of Evil, can you do that? ‘Sackly, now step off.

Returning to Liberty City a decade after the original release was probably going to raise a few eyebrows and call for cries of nepotism and cashing in, but that’s entirely not the case. Yes, it is the same game essentially, and yes, you do have to pay a premium (for iPad games anyway) for a decade old game, but the people from Rockstar haven’t been resting on their smelly bums waiting for you to fork out your hard money in a nostalgic fervour. They’ve tweaked the graphics to take away the odd blurring issue that the original had and gave it a lovely spruce of paint. As well as the important graphics issue which grated cocks back in 2001, they’ve also added a fancy new camera angle which makes the whole thing just like the original Grand Theft Auto. Essentially it’s only a top down view, but for us who still hark back about how fantastic the original Grand Theft Auto was back then, it is a lovely feature.

As you might expect, the controls issue is always a problem with games on iPad, but Rockstar have done the impossible. They’ve made it actually possible to control a 3D character without careening off a cliff or into an bystander. Obviously in GTA3 those are things that you would want to do eventually anyway, but you don’t want to do it involuntarily. The control panels, on both sides of the screen are full of helpful buttons like ‘Walk’, ‘Open Car Door’, ‘Shoot Bitch In Face With Gun’ *paraphrasing* but they aren’t cumbersome or unsightly. They fade in and out when they are in use, and don’t take up space on the playing screen. This might be a problem on the iPhone because of it’s smaller screen, but there was no trouble on the iPad version.

Unfortunately there’s no multiplayer aspects SO FAR, but that’s not to say that there isn’t going to be one in an upcoming update. There’s nothing quite running your girlfriend or boyfriend off the road in their car, only to see it explode into a ball of flames as you burn off to start a new life in a new part of town. It would be nice to see in Grand Theft Auto as well, fnanananaa.

For the remarkable price of ONLY £2.99, the only thing holding you back is if Alexandra Burke herself was selling the fucker on QVC. It’s literally begging for you to play it. And seeing as it’s the season of goodwill to all men, and non-celebrity women, this is either going to get you through some really shit Christmas television, or it’s going to be a great present. Not for us mind, we don’t want anything that you’ve even looked at. We know where you’re eyes have been.

What have you done today? Bet you’ve dragged yourself through your dreary life, bumping into other insignificant doldrumites, who clamour for their carcinogenic hit of Heat magazine to find out what that family of soulless prostitutes we call Kardashians are up to.

Frankly, between us, you sicken us. Maybe you should try a little harder and people will stop thinking you have an alcohol problem and smiling inanely at you when you struggle to open the bottle of Pepsi Max you have with your Boots Meal Deal.

Whereas us, we’ve jumped from cloud to cloud to return an angelic harp to a sad Saint Peter, made a deal with Death himself to let us pass, and ensure that once Britney Spears does pass, she doesn’t return in a zombie form and a red pleather catsuit and managed to lose our girlfriend in a mythical land. So not a bad day’s work really. Bet all the exercise that you’ve had is strumming yourself in the Tesco car park while thinking about how sexy him from Outnumbered is going to be soon. You sicken us.

Of course we could’ve done that all by ourselves, just on the way home from work, but this time it’s because we’ve been testing out the new Dizzy game from the people who made him semi-popular back in the ’80s and ’90s, Codemasters.

Out for iOS, which we don’t need to tell you is what runs on iPhone, the game is a rehash of the 1991 title where you traverse the magical land where eggs can walk, jump, and generally be as philanthropic as you can be, although with spanking new titles that, allegedly, are high definition. Although moving from the pixellated mess of yesteryear is going to be an improvement under any comparison. Look at Steps. They were shit back then, but they’re shitter now because they’re ten years older and still giant assmunchers.

However valiant an effort that Codemasters has put in, it has the same effect as pulling out before spluffing your splaff all up in her bloof.

It’s good, but gaming has moved on immeasurably in the past 18 years and Dizzy hasn’t kept up. The same dodgy controls (weighed down by the failure that is touch screen movement controls) mean that precise jumping you needed back in the 90s is still a problem, and the simplistic ‘Pick something up, take it to someone, use it on that someone’ is still repetitive and, at times, annoying.

Even though the level is very short, you’ll find yourself wandering around aimlessly for hours before giving up, throwing your iPhone on the ground and thinking how awesome it would be if a few letters of the alphabet didn’t exist.

Give Dizzy a wide berth if you want a game that gives some sort of immediate payback. Because, by the time that you do get some payback, you’ve lost interest so much that you don’t care anymore and realise there’s pots of tea to be made and pictures of Jesy from Little Mix to photoshop into hilarious situations.

Shame.

When the first Uncharted game came out way back in 2007, it took us a while to buy it. It’s not Drake’s fault, it’s his big-titted predecessor Lara Croft, and the infuriating Tomb Raider series.

It’s not her big polygonal boobs, or the clipped British accent, or the fact that she’s so ridiculously minted she can afford to piss about, travelling the world and shooting a host of endangered species – it’s that the games she starred in were steaming piles of bear turd, with a terrible shooting dynamic.

Then, one day, with little interest for a new “treasure hunting” game, it dawned on everyone that Uncharted was a game where you could pretend to be Indiana Jones. What’s not to like about that?

Drake is one of those rare characters in gaming where you actually give two hoots about what’s happening to him, and the third instalment from Naughty Dog plays on that in a big way.

The first half hour of the game barely has any action in it (well, at least none of the shooting kind). Instead, you’re thrown into a dodgy deal with London gangsters, a punch up in what can only be a BNP pub, judging by the haircuts, bovver boots and union jacks adorned all over the place, and then you’re thrown into a flashback, where a fresh faced teenage Drake is trying to break into a Colombian museum (because when you’re in Colombia, and coked up to the eyeballs, you need a bit of culture).

This isn’t a game you can just pick up without playing the first two – you’ll literally have lost the plot in less than an hour, and none of the large scale events that have so much meaning to those of us who’ve been with the series from the beginning will be completely lost on you. There are a lot of loose ends that get tied up in the story, and while this shouldn’t be the place for spoilers, Elena (the love interest in the series) plays a big part in this. So, if you’re new to the series, stop reading this now, get the first two dirt cheap online, and come back here when you’re ready.

It’s clear from the start that, while the graphics haven’t been given a massive overhaul, they’re still the prettiest thing you’ll ever see on the PS3. Gone are the soulless dead eyes from Uncharted 2 that could induce really rather terrible nightmares. At times, it’s easy to forget your playing a game. During the game, you may well find yourself stopping to admire the view, gazing out over the desert at midnight, the starlit sky, and lights from the nearest village stretching out to forever [Jesus Christ. What kind of hippie rubbish is this? - Ed].

The acting can’t be faulted either – Naughty Dog have perfected the art of blending motion capture and animation, keeping their stable of voice actors working well beyond the norm for the industry. When you see Drake raise a cheeky eyebrow and flash that crooked smile – you’re watching Nolan North’s performance in the studio. Despite all the hype, L.A. Noire didn’t even come close to nailing graphics like these.

Now, perhaps the most important aspect you want to hear about is the gameplay. To put it bluntly, this game is a bastard! Played on hard setting, this game can still be completed it in two days (or, more accurately, just over 9 hours in total) but, Jesus, you’ll have to work for it.

During that time, we found ourselves dying close to 200 times during playthrough and came very close to launching the control pad through the television on at least 150 of those deaths.

The enemy AI is off the charts. They have eyes in the back of their heads. You think you’re being clever, sneaking up on Messr. Heavily Armed Pirate, but as soon as you’ve hoisted him over the crate, and quietly snapped his neck, his mates are all over you, grenades and bullets flying everywhere while you cower behind an awkwardly placed chaise lounge, crying to yourself as the man with the gigantic shotgun creeps ever nearer with a plateful of ass to hand to you. You can try and sneak around like Solid Snake, but you will get spotted, and when it happens you better make sure you take out the snipers first.

The main concern about Uncharted 3 was that it would repeat the cardinal sin of the second instalment, Honour Among Thieves: throughout Uncharted 2, you perfected shooting and climbing, precision aiming, and generally cowering behind the scenery waiting for the perfect shot. Then the final boss came along, and had you running around in circles and blind firing behind you while the bad guy threw grenades at you.

It was a disappointing end to an amazing game and it made me want to drown kittens. The final boss in Uncharted 3 more than makes up for it. You utilise every skill you’ve had to develop over the course of the series, and by god is it satisfying when it all goes your way! People might complain that the lack of a badass “classic” final boss is a tad unsatisfying, but if you look at the whole level as the final boss, then you can truly appreciate it.

If you’ve played the first two, and haven’t got your hands on the third one yet, then you need to rectify the situation immediately. It might only take two days to complete, but the action packed story, and the multiplayer, will keep you satisfied for months.

This was a guest post by Ed Williams who you can find out more about here.  Just make sure you breathe through your mouth when you’re around him.

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Fifa vs Pro Evo. It’s a battle that has caused many a forum argument and playground bullying campaign as people try to decide which provides the better footballing experience. A battle that has had fresh life breathed into it with the release of the demo versions of Fifa 11 and Pro Evo 11 on both Xbox Live and PSN.

Having spent a long time playing both the latest Fifa and Pro Evo demos I can tell you that they once again offer a broad range of differing aspects of the game… and all of them are boring and insignificant.

I don’t care about the motion capture, I don’t care about the ball having the same physics as a ball that was, in possibly one of the most bizarre statements in sport, described as being too round and I don’t care about the player likenesses.

You know why? Because football is no longer about football, it’s about some of the world’s richest, thickest and, quite frankly, ugliest people taking copious amounts of drugs, sleeping with prostitutes whose ages range from 12 to 90, players trying to win an Oscar for throwing themselves to the ground at every available opportunity while crooked billionaires buy up anything and everything they see.

Seriously, Wayne Rooney and Peter Crouch, 2 men who between them have the IQ of a particularly stupid potato and who both look like they escaped from a zoo for handicapped animals, managed to cheat on their model girlfriends with high class hookers and random girls in clubs. How is this not a more interesting aspect of the game than the lack of talent they managed to display at the World Cup?

Fine, if you want an arcade feel buy Pro Evo, if you want an all around better simulation, buy Fifa. But for the love of God shut up about it being, “the most realistic football experience ever,” it isn’t, there is no button that allows you to dive, no clubs go bankrupt half way through a match and no tabloid sex scandals in the season or be a pro modes. Even This Is Football had a dive button, which instantly makes it 10 times more realistic than either Fifa or Pro Evo.

It’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2011 all over again.

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Tiger Woods is back! You remember him, he’s the one that made golf vaguely interesting for five minutes by having sex with every woman on Earth.

Fresh from his stint in rehab for sex addiction, a condition that only seems to affect pro-sportsmen, the golfing god has returned and passed down to us his latest gospel, the imaginatively titled, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2011.

EA were one of the few companies to stick with Tiger after he was struck down with a crippling case of horniness, mainly because without him they’d be lumbered with an officially licensed PGA game that didn’t have a bankable name gracing it’s cover and wouldn’t be able to shift any copies.

The problem with Tiger Woods something something 2011 is that it doesn’t live up to all the hype generated by Tiger himself in the months leading up to the game’s release. Where’s the ability to have porn stars and call girls come and dance for you? Where’s the level where your wife chases you down the road with a gold club in some sort of GTA style rage? Where’s the crippling sense of failure when you realise that your past has come back to haunt you? In the hands of a company such as Rockstar, this could have been one of the best releases of 2010.

But EA have decided to stick to the golf… that’s right, golf, the single most boring aspect of Tiger Woods’s life. The controls and graphics are essentially the same as every previous incarnation of this game, because that’s just the way EA works, and overall you’re left with this horrible sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as you slowly realise that you’re playing golf… on a games console.

The realisation that you’re controlling one of the most controversial characters in recent history and yet all you’re doing with him is trying to get a birdie at the 9th hole of St. Andrews is one of those few and far between times in gaming that make you realise that maybe you’re better off switching off your console and going outside before you start playing World of Warcraft for 23 hours a day.

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IGN is reporting that a set of 21 Gears of War 3 images has been leaked to the web.

The images predictably show the latest protagonists and backdrops of the first-person shooter series. The multi award-winning Gears of War franchise takes place on the Planet Sera which, much like the planet of Pandora, contains some bizarre mineral that is highly sought after as a power source by us menacing Earthlings and pits the humans against the indigenous population.

The images are beautifully rendered… but why should anyone care? Leaked images from a game in development are almost pointless, they don’t convey the frame rate, set the mood or the show the depth of the level design.

Initial images that are leaked from games always look beautiful because they are stills from a cut scene. This, inevitably, means that the in-game footage won’t be quite up to scratch and will leave the hardcore fans somewhat disappointed by this shameless false advertising. Forcing them to flood internet forums and blogs with comments and opinions no one cares about.

Game leaks are not worth getting excited about unless they’re of in-game footage, such as the recent 10-minute-long Final Fantasy XIII video that found its way onto YouTube, causing fans of Japanese Role Playing Games (not the good sort) everywhere to become even more insufferable. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much more valuable is a video?

Even porn managed to pick up on that.

Gears of War 3 stills

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I’m not a gamer. I’ll happily have an evening with a controller and a few beers, but when my thumbs start to blister and my eyes crust over, I rejoin the real world.

Having said that, I’m not lacking that manchildish streak that still gets pants wettingly excited at the prospect of being a cowboy/ pirate/ zombie/ space marine/ Elvis.

You only have to see the average stag do to see grown men, thanks to intoxication and a flimsy excuse, donning the likeness of their particular hero and having a jolly good prance about.

This is why Rockstar Games had such a genius idea when they took their GTA series and put a Stetson on it. EVERY man out there with a twig and giggleberries loves the idea of being able to skin Clint Eastwood and scare the bum custard out of a saloon full of banditos.

It sound like this is an idea that couldn’t go wrong. Take the guts of the insultingly successful Grand Theft Auto series and set it in the Wild West. Mix intelligent, player-led gameplay with the kind of personality-ruining role play usually found in dingy German fetish clubs and hey presto!

This is where my eight-year-old self pisses himself with excitement. My flatmate has a copy, and lets me play if I give him my pocket money and other stuff. I jumped at the chance. I promptly regretted it.

Like I said, I’m not a gamer, I didn’t really get into the GTA series. Thus the controls rattled me at first. Walking, shooting and watching cut scenes all come naturally, but doing more than one at a time and I am struggling. Plus the fly-behind-camera gets very confused with its zooms and does something to ruin the fire fight. Often performing a colonoscopy on your horse.

There are other irksome features, the lethally long-winded weapon selection menu, the constant button bashing to get John Marston to mince a bit quicker and the fact that you can’t punch accurately.

But these could all be forgiven if the game seemed to have a storyline. There are frequent cut scenes and walk and talks to deliver this to you, but it’s more than likely you’ll skip them as they are insanely dull.

So screw it, let’s do it like a real outlaw. Sod the rules, storyline and helpful hints. I’m going to strike out into the brush by myself and try to find the fun parts of the game.

There is to do, but there doesn’t seem to be much point to any of it. You can help the AI characters, kill them, buy them off or shoot all the horses. This plays havoc with Fame and Honour ratings.  Which means bugger all. You still get given plenty of less than rewarding, shamefully easy mini missions – still with no idea where or how to find the bad guy, or why you want to. I don’t even know what the name is all about.

This makes me think, all this ‘plot’ is probably in the manual. Bloody hell! The bad guy kidnapped Marston’s wife and kid. The game probably mentioned that in some epic cut scene I didn’t watch.

Weirdly, Marston never seems to bring it up. He must have gotten over it and really be enjoying my confused romp through the brush, shooting innocent creatures or lassoing the townsfolk and leaving them all hogtied. There really is no sense of overall point to this game.

But the real world beckons and I’m bored enough of staring at the back of Marston’s head to quit and realise I’ve spent much longer than expected at this. Hours, maybe even days have passed.  I smell, my hands are sore and there are a massive quantity of empty beer cans around.

I have achieved nothing within the game, but it really is addictive. Not in a good, challenging and rewarding way. But in a schizophrenic, Being John Malkovich, stalking Jill Dando kind of way.

It really is a game that is all about escapism. It’s not a game, it’s a fantasy. Rockstar have left you free enough to turn the game into whatever you want it to be. You can be the good, bad or ugly. But you’ll still end up listening to some irritating animated Irishman talking guff about horse gonads.

(By Randy Figgins)

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Project Natal is the revolutionary new controller-free gaming platform for Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Rather than having a physical controller in your hand, you become the controller as your movements are captured by camera in front of or on top of your TV and translated into on screen action. Hecklerspray was fortunate enough to be given a go on the demo game Ricochet.

The future of videogames? Meh, it was OK.

Don’t get me wrong, Project Natal is by no means bad.

In fact, it’s very addictive, disturbingly immersive, a great workout and quite a lot of fun, but the demo game, Ricochet, needs a lot of tweaking. So what is the game about? Well, basically it sees you at one end of what is effectively an extended squash court. You hit and volleyballs towards boxes in order to score points. It all seems very Freudian.

While playing Ricochet, you need to flail your arms and legs very quickly in a somewhat dangerous fashion in order to reach the balls, which makes you wonder how it would look to those watching you play. My guess is like a bell-end.

This is confirmed when, after completing three rounds, you are rewarded with a seemingly random points total and pictures of yourself in action that Natal has taken. The pictures come complete with captions that say “reach for the stars”, and bizarrely “grab the carpet”. You get the idea. In every single one of these pictures, I appeared to be doing a bizarre impression of a meerkat.

So if your idea of a good time is dancing around the room like a loon, this could be just the thing.

Of course, as with any new-fangled things that ‘yoofs’ like, there will soon be the scare stories. Old ladies will be selling their grandkids just for one last go, not to mention the wave of violence as somehow people find it hard to tell the difference between the game and reality. Starved of things to hit, people walking along the street will resort to trying to punch random strangers into pre-ordained targets.

I’ve often asked myself what a wave of violence would look like. Is it fists raining down from the sky? That would be pretty cool, but I would say that because I’m a gamer. It would also be pretty likely if you were standing too close to a tall person who was playing Ricochet.

The Natal unit itself is a sleek white rectangle that looks like it was created by Apple. But there are still a lot of glitches to be sorted out before it is launched this Christmas (so expect it in time for spring 2012).

Natal’s sensors couldn’t quite work out some of the moves people were making and there generally seemed to be a problem with perceiving where objects are in a three dimensional space when they’re rendered on a two dimensional screen.

The demo of Ricochet also fails to live up to the hype created by the demonstration of Lionhead Studios’ Milo and Kate, in which you could interact with the world’s creepiest non-playable characters.
They would speak to you, read your emotions from your facial expression and tone of voice, as well as recognise drawings you have done. Your reflection was even visible in bodies of water and would distort realistically if you touched it. Milo and Kate made you fear Microsoft were planning some sort of Skynet-like AI system using children with the cold dead eyes of Zac Effron. Ricochet makes you wonder if Natal is just going to turn into the Wii mark 2.

But maybe I’m just bitter because I didn’t get to see the fabled Milo in action, which would have opened up a whole world of Red Ring of Death jokes.

(By Kris Wood)

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Trainspotting. Whether it’s the Ewan McGregor-powered head in toilet film or the practice of watching iron horses go by, it is nothing to be proud of.

Fortunately the Personal Computer allows us to indulge forbidden passions such as wanting to drive trains, or a fetish for women in waders, in the privacy of our sordid homes. Regrettably I subscribe to the former camp and relish the idea of driving a virtual Class 30 diesel through Luton Parkway while sounding the horn.

That is until I launch the ‘simulator’ and remember how isolating and badly designed the train sim generally is.

Upon loading, RailWorks presents a clunky menu providing a choice of routes (including the exciting Reading to Paddington) and a list of scenarios. If you’re feeling rebellious there is the ‘Free Roam’ option, or for the very courageous, you can create your own scenario. I feel that I’m beginning to mock the spirit of the game now, despite the fact that means I am, by extension, mocking myself.

The basic version comes with 13 locomotives ranging from British electric, steam and diesel trains to American and European engines. If that’s not enough for your train gobbling appetite there is lots and lots of DLC on Steam. It does come at a price; at time of going to press, a Mk1 Coach pack will set you back a whopping £9.99. However, they have to be applauded for providing these 35+ add-ons; their presence almost counteracts the in-game glitches. They don’t, but almost!

SEVERE DELAYS

A problem I’ve found time after time with train simulators is the lack of in-game cohesion and support, RailWorks is no different. While there is a lengthy downloadable manual to nurse you through your first drive, the onscreen instructions and directions omit vital points. It is also impossible to retrieve the pop up prompts which tell you just which wagons you’re meant to uncouple in which particular siding, or which station you’re meant to stop at first.

If you feel like you must ignore this and want to jab at the buttons in the driver’s cab and wonder why some work and some don’t regardless, then I insist you buy the following. For only $199.95 you can have your very own Desktop Train Cab Controller, complete with three-digit LED speedometer! Only the foolishness of purchasing one of these behemoths will obscure the fact that you’re anally obeying virtual red signals, even though a part of you is 100% sure it’s never going to turn green.

Support for multi-monitor set ups is a nice touch, but merely playing the game on a single decent sized monitor demands three or four times the optimistic minimum spec. Scenarios seldom break from the monotony of picking up passengers from stations, or solving shunting puzzles. Who’d want to be a train driver? More to the point, who’d want to pay to pretend to be one?

Conclusion: You’ll need an anorak and flask of weak lemon drink to ignore the faults to enjoy this – all change (that’s the last train pun).
Arbitrary percentage score: 65%
What is it: Probably the best train simulator out there, but there isn’t any real competition.
Predecessors: Trainz Railroad Simulator, Rail Simulator
You could try: OpenBVE, a train set
Minimum spec: 1.7GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 64MB 3D card
Price: £29.99 from Steam

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Remember the kids’ TV show Knightmare? Where a gawky square-eyed thirteen year old wandered blindly through a Dungeons and Dragons style green-screen environment, with buck-toothed team mates urging him on with instructions like, “two paces left. No, two paces. No, your other left”. Along the way he’d encounter wildly overacting characters who would declare “WELCOME BRAVE KNIGHT TO THE CASTLE OF TRONG! Choose wisely; will ye take the Fiery Chasm of Death? Or this gourd of dragon spunk?”

Well, Enemy of Chaos is like Knightmare. Except it isn’t a TV show. It’s a choose-your-own adventure book and iPhone game. And it’s very, very funny. Yes, and an iPhone game. Having done almost no research into this, we can definitively confirm that this is the only book that’s been published with an accompanying iPhone application. Behold, friends, for tis the future!

Enemy of Chaos author, Leila Johnston, also wrote How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People, which included jokes such as “say “sweet enough already” when someone offers sugar, and “white enough already” when they offer milk” and “make calls with a weary note in your voice, saying “Hello telephone, who are you pretending to be this time?”

See, funny, yeah?

You play the Enemy of Chaos, an ageing embittered geek plucked from a sedentary life of RSI, mild OCD and Doritos to “defeat disorder wherever it is found”, and you set off with an arsenal that includes anxiety attacks and a homeopathic tea bag (molecules contains a memory of tea in a concentration of 1 part per 10/400).

At the end of each section you get to choose which path to take. On the iPhone app, “start a fight” is a frequent option. Depending on your choices, along the way you’ll meet zombies, Demi Moore and your dad, and adventure through both the fantasy realm and the sort of awkward IRL social interactions which will be painfully familiar to anyone who – having paused an extended round of Half-Life to step into the bright, bright daylight to buy snacks – has haltingly attempted conversation with the newsagent.

Enemy of Chaos is hilarious and ferociously intelligent, and pokes gentle, nerdy fun at the sort of person who proudly wears their faded Red Dwarf T-shirt in public, and watches fantasy Manga tentacle porn in private.

There’s also a touch of Douglas Adams about it – you may find yourself going back to reread sentences which are often laugh-out-loud funny in their own right.

So buy it. Buy it for yourself, or your ICT teacher, or for that “bachelor uncle” who accidentally married another man in Second Life that time, and watch the tears of gratitude spill from behind those thick, thick glasses.

Post by the only slightly nerdy Robyn Wilder of Domestic Sluttery

So what if golf is played by the kind of smug cretinous goons who you would pretend not to notice were they getting ever limper under a dust cloud of ASBO fists on a late night bus – this game is amazing. It’s Golf. But it’s, like, Computer Golf.

All the same rules apply as with normal Golf – in that you use your stick to hit the gobstopper at the hole, or into your opponents face. Only, here you don’t have to dress up like a guffawing idiot who probably goes out for prostitutes when no one’s looking.

Play World Golf Tour now

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Summer means no games coming out, it means having to go outside and it means that all we can do is stare longingly at pictures of games that are going to come out at Christmas.

It is a sad time indeed to be a gamer, and one of the worst times for the affliction known as “always looking forward… itis… osis” whereby people insist on ignoring what’s about now and instead focus on what will be about in six months.

Of course, when the six months is up they just end up looking forward to the stuff coming in 2010, and so on and so forth.

The fools!

There are more than enough games around right now to get you through these painfully sunny days where you’re expected to actually move from your grotty little bedsit/parents basement.

Sod the sunshine/rain/overcast skies (delete as appropriate) – play inFamous, or Prototype, or revisit the Chronicles of Riddick and realise while it’s still great, it simply doesn’t have the spark it had on the original release.

Ignore the cries of happiness from the baying morons littering the bars around your homestead – they are lies. Instead, sit in your pants and shoot zombies with your equally-emaciated friends on Left 4 Dead. So they’re making a sequel too soon? So what – this one is out now, to play now – play it and shout at each other!

What we’re saying is – aside from the usual “avoid the outside as it’s full of tossers” thing – is that gamers as a whole need to learn to appreciate the here and now, and need to stop thinking that the best thing is just around the corner.

Titles never seem to get the appreciation they deserve on or soon after release. Instead they are hyped endlessly and looked forward to by thousands, only to be forgotten about until the inevitable retro feature a few years down the line which will ask “why didn’t we pay attention to it at the time?”

So live your life for the now, to the max – except not in that “to the max” way where you’re expected to jump off buildings into piles of flaming glass, or socialise or anything. No, we mean to the max in the sense of wearing the same pair of pants for four weeks as you attempt to finish Ikaruga on one life, and stop paying so much attention to what’s coming.

Though, to be honest, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does have night vision goggles with the special edition… and Borderlands is looking better by the day…

THIS WEEK: As well as remembering to put the ‘THIS WEEK’ bit in, we also realised that Tales of Monkey Island is pretty darn good, and that in future we should have some faith in Telltale‘s ability to… tell… tales. Anyway, back to the monkeys.

There is some news that just gets swept under in the grand scheme of things, even if it’s Twittered about and – as we all know – everyone in the world reads that pile of tripe.

Even news about Lucasarts classics being remade and re-released on one of those new-fangled ‘digital distribution’ platforms, called ‘Steam‘, or something, which has suffered in the wake of the news of Michael Jackson‘s death.

Wait – what do you mean Michael Jackson is dead?!

We hadn’t heard. Three hundred times a day. For the last four months.

Yes, since before he had even died.

Okay, so maybe part of the reason this has been overlooked is because this wonderful column which provides the sole source of gaming news for about 97 per cent of the population wasn’t here last week, but now it is, so pay attention.

We were Twatted with this earlier this week by some Lucasarts chap (not personally, mind):

“Amazing news coming Monday! Super excited! You have no idea how tough it is not to start yelling about it! But it’s secret! Until Monday!”

So, basically, we expected the world to literally explode with the incredi-ultra-megaton that was to be thrust our way.

Instead it was just the news that Lucasarts have realised they can finally get with the times and re-release a chunk of their back catalogue on Steam this Wednesday. Or “tomorrow” if you’re being pedantic.

And what are these games in question? See:

Armed and Dangerous
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure
LOOM
Star Wars Battlefront II
Star Wars Republic Commando
Star Wars Starfighter
The Dig
Thrillville: Off the Rails

So it’s a pile of games that were out a few years ago, one that was out last year and some bona-fide classic adventures (though strangely lacking Sam and Max or Day of the Tentacle). It’s not the haul we all maybe hoped for, but there is good and potentially good news to come.

For one, there’s the remake of The Secret of Monkey Island coming soon to PC and 360, meaning we get to look at a reskinned version of a game that we’ve replayed every year since it came out. So… that’s… life-changing.

Then there’s the new episodes of Monkey Island coming from Telltale. Which would be nice, were it not for the fact that the company have a questionable comic ability gland at the best of times, and this is a series which simply has to be funny. Don’t fail us, or there’ll be fire. FIRE.

And third, there’s the chance that if these re-releases on Steam and 360 do well, along with the new one on PC and Wii, we might get to see reskinned versions of the games we really want to see. Hello, Full Throttle.

Then again, there’s a chance we won’t, and this will all be as disappointing as if Michael Jackson died.

What do you mean he’s…

Apologies to those who missed last week’s Guff – we know how much you love it and how it ranks amongst the most-viewed pages in hecklerspray history, but the hive mind went on a road trip. By train.

So, back to normal service it is. Hey – aren’t these things that happened over the last couple of weeks in gaming funny! Ho ho ho.

Seriously though – that whole PEGI/BBFC furore has produced some amazing bitchiness and a lot of people who didn’t care about the whole thing reacting in a way that suggests they still don’t care about the whole thing.

What a (two) week(s)!

In a nutshell: games in the UK were rated by one of two boards.

Either by PEGI (the Pan European Game Information ratings system), who would slap some easily-ignorable signs on a box to advise people on whether they should buy the game for their kids or not. These were not legally-enforceable, so an 18-rated game could be sold directly to a child.

Or by the BBFC (the British Board of Film Classification), who would put big, nasty signs on, the same as those you see on DVDs. These were legally-enforceable, meaning little Johnny couldn’t buy Grand Theft Auto himself. This meant his mummy would just buy it for him, then complain to the Daily Mail when the game swore/had violence/prostitutes were present/anything else happened that they would have been warned about would they have paid any attention to their child’s activities.

Basically, these two entities didn’t get along, and it was decided that one of the two should take over the reigns, rating all games released in the UK and telling you idiots out there whether something is appropriate for you or not.

The winner was PEGI, possibly after some kind of censorship-off where they saw who could fuzz-out the (in)appropriate parts of a woman’s anatomy fastest.

Hilariously, the BBFC commented after losing, saying:

“The BBFC has always supported PEGI and wished it well, but it continues to believe that it satisfies these requirements better than PEGI.”

Or: ‘they may have won, but we don’t care – we’re better. We don’t even care. We didn’t want to do it anyway. Rating games is for fat idiots.’

Petty, petty censorship children. You have to love it.

The main problem with all of this, though, is that everyone in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an idiot, and these new certifications will either be completely ignored, totally misunderstood or not trusted by the populace.

Which would make them – as anyone who has worked somewhere that sells games or DVDs knows – just as useless as the current ratings system, legally-enforceable or not.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what they’ll make of the game based on Lars Von Trier‘s new film.