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You can find me in da club! By which I mean you can find me by the bins.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (Xbox 360)
Nothing is more important to 50 Cent than money. Making money, either through his popularity in the “rap game” or by hustling, whatever that entails, is his prime goal in life. He’s even named himself after some money, albeit an oddly small amount. Unlike Chamillionaire, although I’m not exactly sure how much a chamillion is – you may insert your own pet shop joke here if you wish. An honest 50 Cent simulator would probably be more of a Tycoon type game where you manage money, release records, invest in bling and invent beefs with other rappers that are about as convincing as the feud between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. For better or worse, because now I think about it that sounds pretty good, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is dedicated to the other side of the rapper’s persona – the side that reckons he is a hard bastard.
 50 Cent using cover, because he is afraid of the shooty men. As Blood on the Sand opens, 50 Cent and G-Unit are playing a gig in some stereotypically dusty, bombed-out and dangerous middle-eastern country. They’re going to net a frankly ridiculous ten million dollars for the show, but 50 is clearly expecting trouble as he appears onstage in full combat gear complete with grenades. Well, either that or developers Sandbox couldn’t be bothered to make a different character model for him. Backstage the promoter claims to have been robbed of the cash, and rather than opting for litigation (they surely must have signed a contract, right? It’s $10m!) 50 freaks out, pulls a gun and demands alternative remuneration. The promoter hands over a diamond encrusted skull, and apparently lucks onto the one thing 50 Cent loves more than money – a skeleton/jewellery combination. But as soon as 50 walks out of the office and into a training level the skull is nicked by bad guys, and the rest of the game has you in running battles with local gangs, terrorists and shady CIA men in an attempt to get it back. This involves 50 Cent striding into a lot of cut-scenes shouting “WHERE’S MY SKULL?”, calling people bitches and shooting them. I like to imagine that the whole thing is in 50′s head, as if he’s had some psychotic paranoid break with reality and thinks that it’s his actual skull that’s been stolen. Either way it’s a plot as original as it is barking mad, and just one of the many reasons that I have come to love this game.
As a Gears of War clone, Blood on the Stand stacks up pretty well. The co-op play works great whether you’re partnered with AI or a friend over Live as one of G-Unit (Lloyd Banks, Tony Yayo and DJ Whoo Kid are all selectable), and the basics of cover, blindfire and movement are implemented solidly. The levels are really nicely done too, guiding the player linearly between open areas that allow a fair amount of variety in approach. Players are free to break for high ground and search out sniping opportunities, use the sticky cover to pick bad guys off one by one, or charge in with a shotgun and some upgradeable melee takedowns. A wide variety of weapons and moves can be bought and swapped in, and the action is enlivened by a combo multiplier scheme swiped almost wholesale from The Club. Multipliers can be extended through liberal use of what the game calls a taunt button, but what is actually a swear button: yes, one press of the left stick and 50, Tony, Lloyd or, erm, Whoo will unleash a foul-mouthed torrent of abuse at your enemies. And in a move which encapsulates the game’s silly but undeniable sense of humour, you can use the in-game shops (located at frequently placed payphones) to buy and swap in more swear packs. Upgradable effing and jeffing – we truly live in an age of wonder. There’s a couple of quite poor driving sections and one pretty good on-rails turret gun mission in there, but the majority of the six or seven hour campaign is a steadily more difficult gun battle with dudes, some other dudes, some more dudes and helicopters for bosses.
 "Hi, I'm Lance Reddick, television's pre-eminent stern baldy, and I'm in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand! I love the game so much that I've got all the achievements. I did the co-op with Detective McNulty - he likes playing as Tony Yayo, whereas I am a DJ Whoo Kid man." Graphically, Blood on the Sand does okay but poses no challenge to third person pack leader Uncharted 2. 50 and his friends are beefy, the blood is red and the sand is sandy – it’s an orange and brown game and it won’t win any awards. Sound is another matter: though the acting of G-Unit is generally awful, the rest of the cast is quite a bit better with some quality work from Lance Reddick (of The Wire, Lost and Fringe, and who suffers one of the funniest deaths in all of gaming in this), Dwight Schultz and go-to comedy Arab Omid Djalili. Presuming you like 50 Cent’s records, there’s a ton of them here to be going on with. Starting with a dozen or so and unlocking more as you progress, the player has a massive list of 50 Cent tracks to listen to when playing, and the game sensibly lets you create playlists of your favourites. So P.I.M.P. and In Da Club over and over again for most people. Finishing the game unlocks a music video gallery, but this is a pretty abysmal reward – not only are the videos horribly encoded, they’re also censored for language. In a game which seems to place cussing front and centre, this is either a curious cop-out or a really unfortunate mistake and you won’t even watch them once.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is an astonishing piece of work – crude, stupid, derivative and possibly offensive – and one that should not on paper hang together anything like as well as it does. As a follow up to the incredibly shit 50 Cent: Bulletproof, Blood on the Sand is nothing short of a revelation, even if technically it’s merely above average. What it does have going for it is some good design, some intentional laughs and a fair selection of jaw-dropping clangers that entertain massively without interrupting the flow of play. Coming in under that magic £10 price point, it won’t even break the Lloyd Banks. Sorry.
 Bin related features
The maths of a bargain binner
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Hours of game per £1 spent – 1 (average, but I foresee a lot of replayability in it – maybe another 10 hours which would double this number.)
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Achievements per hour – 36 (average)
It started with a text message:
“Fancy having a go at the Endless Setlist on Easter Monday? We’ll go for the Bladder of Steel achievement. 8am start so we can be finished nice and early.”
Thus spake Mat Harding, drummer with Penzance thrash punk pink latex combo Bugga, and Xbox 360 achievements hunter extraordinaire. Well why not came the harmonious response from the assorted members of the Way of the Rodent/Old Boys Gaming Network South West chapter. After all, what better way of spending Easter Monday could there be than to attempt to play six-and-a-half hours back-to-back through Rock Band 2’s 84-set song list? I mean, fucking beat that Jesus! The fact that most of us had never listened to, let alone played through some of the more difficult mosh fest songs that would crop up at the end, when our concentration levels were likely to be shot to pieces, seemed a mere trifle of piffling inconvenience.
And so we said yes. Fast forward to another text message, this time from Mr Nocky T:
“I am terrified and part of me says don’t do it!”
And you know what, he was right was our boy Nick. The closer the gig came, the more nervous we grew. I utter no word of a lie when I say that I spent the entire Sunday/Monday night dreaming of the Endless Setlist, and more particularly, fucking it up. When the alarm went off at 8.30am, I felt frazzled and tetchy. Who among us, after all, could face being the one who committed the fatal error after five hours in the saddle? How would we be able to look our fellow Rodent in the eye?
But we were going to make a go of it nevertheless. The time was commuted to a more reasonable 12pm start and the initial line up – Kentish, Mat, Nocky T and The Incredible Tromain Keith – set about making the instruments ‘interruption-proof’. To earn the ‘Bladder of Steel’ achievement, there could be no pauses or interludes whatsoever – all of the songs had to be played straight through. So we taped pennies over the top of the casing that housed the Start and Select buttons to ensure they were insulated from stray fingers. We used wired drums and a microphone to mitigate connection faults and put in fresh, high performance batteries into the guitars. Mat also issued a strict decree that the oven could not be used in case it tripped his electrics.
A note was made of potential toilet breaks for drummer Mat, as we accepted early on that even on medium level, he was the one truly irreplaceable component at the heart of our barely-oiled machine. We fuelled ourselves with bananas, coke and Duracell-tasting energy drinks, and trained our eyes not to blink for the rest of the day. And then we hoped for the best.
But upon firing up the 360, Mat revealed one minor detail…the Endless Setlist wasn’t quite ready to play. “We just need to get to 600 stars,” he said. “It should only take a couple of tracks – we could practise the six hardest songs while we’re at it.”
It was sound logic, and so without further question we stumbled our way through a ‘warm up’ set, including Painkiller and Shoulder to the Plow, even failing at 92% on one of them – cue a few raised eyebrows and nervous mutterings of ‘we’ll get it right when it matters’. That done, we discovered we were still 29 stars short! So on we went, cocooned in a rock bubble with our headphones on, all the while blissfully unaware that poor old Matt had arrived from St Ives and had been knocking on the door for 40 minutes. It was not until news of his plight reached the forum that we became aware, and were able to let the poor roadie in. And the lad had certainly come laden with all manner of technical gizmondos that would prove vital in capturing the spirit of the day.
Several songs later we hit the 600-mark. Hello Cleveland?
Nope. Still no Endless Setlist.
Thankfully our answer to Jeanine St Huggins and Ian Faith (Mat’s sister Kim and her boyfriend Andrew – the brother of Silent Mountain to boot) came to the rescue, and thanks to the wisdom of the Internet, the road to Amarillo was mapped out – we had to unlock Moscow by playing more gigs in Boston.
One setlist later and Moscow did verily appear… but no sign of the Endless one.
With the clock now audibly ticking and the reserves of energy junk food visibly diminished, we finally found it in Shanghai, and one final eight-song challenge later, we were ready. Or were we? No, we were now informed that we needed a total of 900 stars! Hooray! This was now descending into complete and utter farce. After all the talk, we were going down like a lead zeppellin.
Suddenly Bill (Lateph on the website) appeared like a magic rock genie and produced his memory card upon which he had an unlocked save file. He had saved the day.
It was now 4.30pm.
Doubts were aired as to whether we should push on - I’d been making a mental note of other potential weekends and bank holidays when we could try again. But Mat, who had been drumming for three hours by now, was adamant that we’d give it a go. And so we did.
The energy levels that surged through the room during those first ten songs were incredible. With Bill now ensconced on lead guitar, Keith and I swapping bass duties, and singing split between myself, Matt, Nick and Kim, there was a giddy sense that we were finally under way on our epic journey, albeit one that could end with us broken and weeping at any moment on the side of the road.
As the initial surge gently subsided, iconoclast Nick walked off-stage to take care of the kids’ dinner, and the rest of us knuckled down to record a searing set of tracks, coming close on several occasions to achieving straight 100% rankings across the board. There were a couple of wobbles, even a vocal fail at one point, but everything was ticking along nicely. “I like it – this line up is a tight unit,” said Mat as we ground our way through the 3os. Time slowed as we neared the half-way point, possibly even going backwards at one point, as if in the grip of fuming young megalomaniac Budgie, hundreds of miles away.
8.00pm
Jax appeared. Nick and the boys reappeared. Suddenly we were into the serious 60s, and then the seriously shitting ourselves 70s. Jax and Matt’s vocals were sensational, demonstrating an ability to hit and hold a note perfect even if the words they were singing sometimes bore little resemblance to, well, words at all. Glances were exchanged, little shakes of the head and weary smiles. How was Mat doing it? This was ten hours plus for him now! How was Bill maintaining his stamina as the speed and pressure ramped up? Could a visibly nervous Nocky hold it together in the home-stretch? Was the scene set for little Murray to crawl under the drum kit and switch the console off?
10.30pm
The last six songs were bliss and agony and gentle hysteria. Mat got off to a terrible start on the penultimate track and had to crawl back up the cliff face. Then Nocky veered dangerously towards oblivion on the last track, Painkiller, before heroically steadying the ship. The scenes of celebration as Mat nailed the closing beats were as thrilling and spontaneous as they come, and the hugs and high fives were a genuine outpouring of relief, emotion and friendship. I’d like to claim that the achievements were unimportant at that moment, and to some extent they really were irrelevant. But as we stood transfixed, waiting for that ping to signify the job was done, we all knew we’d enjoy basking in the afterglow even more if we had the badges to prove it.
That red-nosed old twat Fergie once said, “Football, bloody hell.” And you know what? At that very moment I felt it was never truer of our Rodent clan and the antics that they inspire and aspire to. Not for the first time had I been a part of something that transcended the communal act of playing a videogame with friends. You only had to look around the room to realise something special was taking place – which was somewhat ironic given that Rock Band itself demands myopic focus on the screen. Bill playing guitar behind his head, not because he wanted to show off but because he had become part of our little fiction. Kim dutifully attending to her brother’s needs – fetching him sustenance and drink, and giving it the ‘go, go, go’ when his one and only opportunity for a toilet break came up. There was the enthusiasm of those people taking a turn off the instruments in keeping the forum updated, wanting to share with them some of the magic that was building in the room. And then there was Nocky and Murray, father and son, belting out Spirit in the Sky, a vision to bring a revitalising tear of joy to even the most tired of eyes. What had started out as a slightly half-baked idea had become a karmic adventure that I don’t think any of us there that day will forget in a hurry. In those six-and-a-half, no, ten hours, we played our hearts out.
We played our hearts out.
 Hello Cleveland
 Your PSP When was the last time you turned your PSP on? I bet the battery has run out again.
Thing is though, Sony’s little handheld has been undergoing a bit of a quiet rennaisance lately – the PSN store has a slow and steady stream of top quality gaming tat on the back of the PSP Go release. Could it be that the PSP is finally finding a niche for itself?
Patchwork Heroes is typical of the kind of quiet confidence of this new breed of PSP game (see also; Fat Princess, Loco Roco Midnight Carnival, Eye of Judgement) – essentially an update of Qix with a wafer thin plot (or is it?) about warships and bombs. To be honest, with the addition of a few different enemy types, that about covers it – if cutting sections out of playfields appeals to you at all, then you’ll already be interested. It works, and it works well enough for the job at hand.
 Doesn't look like much? But it does more than that, there’s humour here, and self awareness (play the demo if you don’t believe me) and lots of neat little touches that you wouldn’t expect to see from a download only title. Challenge modes, collectibles, score attacks, time attacks, S-Ranks abound for the completist. Patchwork Heroes is confident enough in it’s own skin to try and introduce a new world, new characters and it’s own graphical style.
It’s six quid on the PSN store, and it knocks everything on DSi-ware into a cocked hat. Do yourself a favour – blow the dust off, charge that battery and, at least, give the demo a bash.
What I’ve been wasting my time and money on since I finished Mass Effect 2.
The Incredible Hulk (XBox 360)
 Hulk hate man! Also, Hulk hungry for packet of Minstrels! I have a theory about why it’s so hard to get the Hulk right in media outside of comics, and it’s to do with Bruce Banner. He is by necessity a blank compared to the raging mass of emotion that is the Hulk, so much so that unlike Peter Parker, Reed Richards or Tony Stark he doesn’t even have a defined look beyond a pair of glasses, and even those are often drawn as opaque, hiding as much personality as possible. Thus in faithful adaptations, good actors like Eric Bana and Edward Norton struggle to make something of a man who is, after all, a prelude to something else, a walking Ides of March. Not to say that Banner is intrinsically boring: just that he alone is rarely interesting or even likeable, and the notion of him is better brought out by the qualities of art rather than an actor’s performance – especially when they’re forced to play second fiddle to a big, green special effect of themselves.
Ed Norton’s likeness and voice is all over The Incredible Hulk, the Sega published tie-in to the movie of the same name, but it really sounds as if he didn’t want to do it. In fact, the cut-scenes and dictaphone messages that punctuate the missions in the game are so flat and so truncated that it becomes funny to imagine his sulky Norton face thinking up ways to sabotage the game. Ed Naughty, more like.
My honest reaction to The Incredible Hulk is one of pleasant surprise. Prevailing wisdom decrees that 2005′s The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is far superior – and it is really – but this game is still a huge green laugh in ruined trousers. It’s a real shame that the move set is markedly smaller than in the older game (no running along vertical surfaces, no surfing on smashed vehicles), but once I adjusted my expectations I had a lot of fun. Free to bound and climb around a fairly ropey looking but appealingly huge New York, the lovely hi-res Hulk can punch, smash, grab and throw just about anything. Any destructive activity at all attracts the attention of the military, raising a threat level which determines the strength of the response. Level 1 brings soldiers and jeeps, but get to level 9 and they start throwing near-indestructable Hulkbuster armour suits at you. Scouring the rooftops and alleyways will reveal a couple of hundred collectible power-up capsules, which post-Crackdown appears to have become the cornerstone design concept of any superhero game and yet still hasn’t become boring.
 "Whilst I am undoubtedly a great actor, my disdain for the videogame tie-in will be apparent to all who play it. The only plausible explanation? I am a Sony fanboy and I h8 SEGA LOL!!!1" Whilst it roughly follows the plot of the film with extra baddies the U-Foes, the (ahem) Bi-Beast and the Enclave thrown in, the missions are predictable – beat this robot, protect that building, carry that machine to this place whilst being chased by helicopters. Sensibly, the makers have had the good sense to stick a lot of very silly activities in as minigames and distractions, such as a dartboard the size of a skyscraper that Hulk has to javelin snatched up poles into from the roof of an adjascent building. Odder still, famous landmarks around Manhattan have tokens inside them that you can only get at by smashing them to the ground. So the game features the still slightly surprising sight of New York skyscrapers crumbling in clouds of dust, only this time caused by a gamma-spawned mutation rather than the so-called US government.
The admirable boatload of extras (virtually every Hulk variant and some Hulk-sized enemies are available as playable alternate skins) don’t truly balance out the repetition, occasional glitchiness (my 360 crashed five times in the 13 hours I played this, though autosaves are fortunately frequent) or do anything to challenge the superior story, play and structure of the last Hulk game. Marvelites – which I definitely am – and anyone who likes laughing at Ed Norton – which I definitely do – may find a good few hours of fun here anyway, especially at the bintastic sub-£10 prices it can now be bought at.
Bin related features
The maths of a bargain binner
I hate my Blackberry. It’s a work phone, and it works fine. Emails, calls, no complaints – it is the model of functionality other than the awful camera. But it’s so utterly bloody boring that I can barely stand to put it in my pocket let alone use it. One thing alone keeps me from crushing it beneath my substantial boots in a massive hissy fit, and it is a Breakout clone called Brickbreaker.
 Just sending this report to the directors! It’s crappy in almost every regard – buggy, random, the controls are fiddly. But it’s there! And it’s a game and you can play it! And when you do play it looks like you’re sending a vital email except for the vocal torrent of fucks and bastards it generally elicits, or the expression of bliss that washes over you when you get into that rare zone, and start batting back the ball effortlessly even at the highest of speeds, and tears of joy start running down your face and the man from the government regulator asks you if you’re okay and you can only beam at the rest of the people in the meeting because they all have Blackberrys and they must – they MUST – know how this feels.
Yesterday, whilst waiting for IT to get me up and running in a new office, I shattered my old high score and saw level 26 for the first time.
My high score is 15900.
Let’s go.
 Joint Chiefs of Staff at 2pm? I can get a quick one in.
The regular results of trawling through bargain bins, by someone with more sensible things to spend spare tenners on.
The Wheelman (XBox 360)
The repeated attempts to capture the magic of the cinema car chase in a game has resulted in a few entertaining rides for players. From Spy Hunter through Chase HQ, the rough and tumble open worlds of Driver and GTA, and the strange hybrid destruction racers like Burnout and NFS: Most Wanted, improved physics and graphics have meant that we’re closer than ever to living the rollercoaster thrill of Bullitt steaming down that bumpy hill in San Francisco, or Nicolas Cage doing it again in The Rock. The Wheelman is Midway’s go at an open world car chase game, and it’s so very nearly right that its uncontestable mediocrity is all the more galling.
 Impractical hood ornaments - is your ride is too pimped? The lead character is Vin Diesel, all shiny of scalp and tectonic plate activity of larynx, he’s called Brick Cragston or Chase Hardfist or something equally tough sounding, and his presence stamps The Wheelman out as kin of Chow Yun-fat and John Woo’s Stranglehold. It’s an action movie franchise waiting to happen, but which probably won’t if the world has any sense. Behind the wheel of a car, the deep-voiced slaphead is a deadly bastard – flicks of the right stick slide the car aggressively sideways or forward, ramming into other traffic or dodging obstacles. He’ll shoot from the driving seat during a chase, but his special Wheelman powers (possibly granted when he was bitten by a radioactive circle) allow him to spin his car 360 degrees and get off a few devastatingly accurate bullet time shots without losing momentum. Rather excellently, the aiming reticule will stick slightly to weak points of enemies – tyres, fuel tanks, drivers, engines and gun-toting passengers – allowing the smooth-bonced gravel muncher to take out a few vehicles at once if you’re quick. You can also use a ludicrous ‘airjack’ move, where the basso profondo chromedome can leap out of his vehicle and into another provided they have been lined up for a couple of seconds. This car and bike hopping combined with the fairly original combat moves, makes the car chases really fun and even spectacular to play, even if the lack of variance in enemy behaviour allows things to get repetitive at times.
 ACTIVATE WHEELMAN POWERS Unfortunately, just as the Hulk must cease being incredible and transform back to puny Banner, Wheelman must sometimes stop driving and revert to his everyday identity as a bald twat for some on-foot third person shooting. These mandatory sections are shockingly poor, with awful generic environments, hamfisted controls and a true sense of pointlessness. Honestly, it’s just been established that you can spin a car all the way around at 150mph whilst shooting with uncanny accuracy, and that you can jump onto a scooter from the roof of a burning hatchback at speed – where’s the joy in having a your little Vin Diesel crouching behind a portaloo waiting for a guy to reload so you can headshot him? It’s the worst thing in history.
One of the most admirable decisions in The Wheelman is the setting. Understanding that Rockstar have got the archetypes of US cities locked down, the developers have modelled Barcelona, and appropriately the graphics when driving are colourful and continental, and the music suitably Latin. Sadly, the city is also way too empty, characterless and samey to be fun to just drive around in – you’ve no hope of learning to navigate by landmarks like Burnout’s Paradise City, or GTA4′s Liberty City, or stupid real life. Thus The Wheelman veers once more off the slip road of excellent ideas and into the motorway services of despair.
The Wheelman at least offers pretty good value for money, especially now it can be found for around £10. There’s no multiplayer, but the story campaign clocks in at more than 10 hours, and there’s a lot of optional side quests – races, taxi missions, jump challenges and so on. If the gameplay clicks at all, and the driving did with me, there’s an adequate amount of fun to be found smashing up Catalan policia and criminales. It’s up to you whether adequate alone is worth a few quid in the racially ambiguous cueball’s Strepsils fund.
 Bin related features
Rotten on-foot sections
Past sell-by-date city design
The maths of a bargain binner
Hours of game per £1 spent – 1.5 (average)
Achievements per hour – 31.3 (so very, very average)
 I love bargains. Don’t we all? But I take particular pleasure in rooting out the unloved, middle of the road titles from bargain bins and second-hand shelves. Games that slipped out to no fanfare and little critical response at full price, slowly drifting down in price and into the rarely-considered, grey recesses of the bottom shelves, the wire basket, the back of the rack. Occasionally one unearths a true gem, or a stinker of almost unimaginable proportions. Mostly you just end up with something average. But even an average game has had the effort of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people lavished on it, and once carried the hopes and aspirations of developers, producers, programmers, writers, actors. Unknown soldiers of contemporary gaming – I’m going through the bins for you.
Wanted: Weapons of Fate (XBox 360)
 This makes it look pretty shocking. What do you want from your third person shooter of choice? Gears of War so radically shifted what the genre is that Wanted: Weapons of Fate could be described as dramatically underspecced or, if one were feeling charitable, refreshingly uncomplicated. There is no choice of weapons until the last two stages of the astonishingly short campaign, no multiplayer, and piss-easy bosses. Wanted does have a single great and very well implemented gimmick, one that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie that this acts as a sequel to: you can bend bullets, firing them along curved paths in order to take out baddies lurking behind cover. It’s fun, but it’s not enough.
Technically, there is nothing shoddy about Wanted. It’s solid, reliable, moves at a fair clip and is occasionally somewhat spectacular. The slo-mo bullet cam that sometimes kicks in when you kill using the curved shot is fun, and the now obligatory sticky cover mechanic is particularly well done, with the ‘take cover’ button being used to guide you to the next bit of cover clearly with on-screen arrows. The game is designed so that 90% of it is played from cover positions – bullets are deadly but you auto-heal very quickly. You can also activate a very brief slo-mo attack, melee take-downs, and there’s a strange, underused blind-fire pressure system that can allow you to get the upper hand on opponents. You have to use it against the first boss and never need to again after that.
Playing through on Normal took me around three hours, and unlocked Hard mode. It wasn’t really any harder, though – predictable enemy AI and familiarity with the nice-looking but linear levels and cut-scenes meant I had it polished off in around two hours. Currently in your bargain bins at around £10, I don’t feel that the length is a problem, but at £35 I might have felt outraged. The surest sign that Wanted: Weapons of Fate is a mediocre game is that after five hours I’m done with it, left only with a few more achievements and a little closer to the end of my life. Oh, and amazement that they managed to rope Terence Stamp and Peter Stormare (continuing his mission to appear in every bit of drama ever produced) to do voices, but not James McAvoy. Come on McAvoy, are you really too good for this? Yes is the answer, yes you are. But I am not.
Bin-related features
Sticky cover
Rats (exploding)
Rubbish bosses
Filthy language
The maths of a bargain binner
Hours of game per £1 spent – 0.5 (not great)
Achievements per hour -140 (extremely good)
 So. The awards are done and dusted. There were tears, sexual tensions and booze. More importantly 2009 can finally be laid to rest here and now – mid February (I know. Man we are getting lax with our timings aren’t we?)
Anyway – to close 2009 with an absolute gem and put in an early contender for dailyrodent post of the year, here is young Kentish’s review of 2009. Forgive us our indulgence if you aren’t aware of the forum and get comfy as it’s a cracker.
The Rodent Retrospective Revoo
Well 2009 was a load of old shit wasn’t it? All those crushing disappointments, unfounded ambitions and despairing lunges towards respectability? It was enough to make Tromain get very, very angry indeed. And you know what happens when Tromain gets angry.
But enough about the agonising home and away defeats suffered by The South in the inaugural Rodent Regional Football Rumpus. What about the games? Those little discs of joy that we cradle to our collective bosom when our partners leave us for someone more mature. And what of the Way of the Rodent itself? What sort of path was trodden by its cast of characters?
Well, come with us now on a journey through time and (Dead) space, as we reflect on the highs, the lows and the s’pose it’s’alrights of 2009.
January – March
Time was when the slate for first quarter releases was as bald as Unkie T’s glorious and wrinkle free dome. But 2009 is having none of that old chestnut. In fact, like the aforementioned ladies man-mountain, its post Christmas sack is bursting with goodness. Left4Dead is one such orgasmic release, a frantic, breathless FPS that really comes into its own with eight-man multiplayer mayhem, full of vomiting ghouls, extended tongue action and wild thrashing limbs. Much like your usual Rodent get-together then. Street Fighter 4 provides a glorious trip down Memory Lane for all but little Budgie, who being just 12 years old can barely remember Third Impact on the DC let alone Street Fighter 2 on the SNES. And our resident famine victim Reloaded takes umbrage at the stereotyping of the zombies in Resident Evil 5 – not on a racial level, oh no, but the fact they are all so mal-nourished. He skips lunch in protest and passes out mumbling that “it’s not as good as 4 in any case”.
The Rodents gather for their usual Awards ceremony despite producing just a single magazine since, well, the last awards bash. Stuff here about the event. (Ed: that was indeed a placeholder you just saw. We left it in as it’s arguably more fun than if we put something in there) On the other side of the world meanwhile, wandering minstrels Mr Kentish and Just Jax make several stunning discoveries on their global trip to visit as many Rodents as possible; namely Abducta’s missus is well fit; Pete Moobs can’t cook bacon for shit; and Stevo hides tame magpies in his beard.
April – June
It’s still all gone a little quiet on the gaming front, so the Rodent mob makes its own entertainment. Weeks of feverish transfer activity and fantasy football league dealings precede the first ever North v South football match. Sheffield provides the venue for the historic opener, with shaven man monkey Solid Chris heroically pulling the event together. By the time the match gets underway, he’s so pumped he’s already head-butted his wife and berated his team mates for not passing to him in the warm up. Remarkably, his personification of Northern Grimness and propensity to perform scissor kicks at the most unsuitable moments proves too much for The South to bear, who slip to an embarrassing 15-3 defeat.
Despite the set-back, The South regroup in Oxford and come at The North with all the vengeance of a slightly offended academic. Seizing upon the inspirational words of Rocky ‘three away goals’ Howard, and boosted by the presence new Sony mascot Mr Nath and reformed IRA terrorist Gogol, they take the game to their uncouth visitors and have the champs wobbling on the ropes. An upset looks on the cards until Jimmy Grimble ties up his whippet, hands his cloth cap to Vanessa and rubs the coal dust from eyes. Thus unencumbered, he turns the match for a 10-9 victory. One week later Budgie and his guns marry his 13-year-old sweetheart Julia. They go on their honeymoon to Megabowl.
There’s a brief flurry of interest in Halo-killer Killzone 2, especially after Morgan gets a dodgy Littlewoods order code that reduces the game to just £7 – a galling state of affairs for Chad Sexington who had paid a ‘Chad’ for it some weeks earlier. Shadow Complex woos the Metroid crowd and proves one of the finest releases on Xbox Live, while over in Wii-land, six months have passed with barely a glimpse of a new game.
July – September
The summer rolls around and there’s candyfloss and ice cream and fwuffy bunnies in the air. You can’t open a copy of the Daily Rodent Record without being assailed by doe-eyed snaps of KO and Emzar drifting around the place on Cloud 9. They narrowly pip Spooky and Dizzy to the title of first Rodent couple to shack up together, and celebrate by releasing a series of icing sugar-coated videos. In the final episode Rich renounces his 15-year love affair with Rocky.
Thankfully, Batman: Arkham Asylum provides an adrenalin shot to the heart of this sugar-induced coma with its inspired mix of free-flowing combat, stealth and exploration. The pugilistic prowess of Fight Night 4 is also on display, and yet somehow fails to capture the Rodent imagination in the same manner as its predecessor. Perhaps it’s because resident champ, turned chump (Little) Solid Chris hangs his gloves up to become a father. He’s not alone in ushering in new life to the world – PaulEMoz also has a son, while there’s a false alarm in the TwistedScrote household when his pregnancy is revealed to be a phantom one – just a plastic sex toy lodged in his lower intestine.
In the pervading economic climate of doom, Wii owners take to inventing their own games for the console – with popular pursuits such as hiding the Wii, passing the Wii, and revisiting Gamecube back catalogues all receiving scores of 80% in Official Nintendo Magazine.
October – December
Now we’re cooking. The presence of Modern Warfare 2 on the release schedule sent most of its competitors either scurrying into the New Year or edging nervously forward like a line up of naked men in the shower, with Jimmy Grimble standing proudly behind them. Even Halo ducks out of a head-to-head showdown and releases Orbital Drop Shock Troopers to a somewhat lukewarm autumn reception. Maybe it is the hub-like structure, or those weird cock monsters who float around. Whatever, not even the presence of Nathan Fillian can save it from the dreaded ‘meh’ reaction from many in Rodentia.
Forza 3 goes a little the same way, revealing major fault lines between the hardcore Forza 2 devotees and the more casual end of the racing spectrum. FIFA 10 is a nailed on classic though, and an elegant Torres to the prosaic Dirk Kuyt that Pro Evo has become. Uncharted 2 is the kind of PS3 exclusive all too rarely seen this year – a nicely judged series of cut scenes punctuated by the odd excellent gaming interlude. And bless it, little Borderlands – look at him go, with his Fallout 3-lite levelling and smashing cartoon graphics. Worth a Chad in anyone’s money. A cloud of dust the size of Finland is reported in the atmosphere above Britain as thousands of Wiis are switched on simultaneously for New Super Mario Brothers, before the vast majority are switched off again 30 minutes later.
And so to Modern Warfare 2. Was it as good as Modern Warfare 1? Well from a campaign perspective probably not, despite the frequently astonishing graphics and a more forgiving experience at Veteran level. It was all a bit too Michael Bay for some tastes, with the shock and awe factor set to 11. But the presence of Spec Ops rounded out the package when in all honesty, Activision could have flogged and still had themselves a number one hit.
Even with all this gaming goodness, the Rodents still find time to invent an excuse to meet up at KO’s house and drink vast quantities of alcohol. Yes, it’s the second Rodent Racquet Rumpus, where despite possessing a squash serve rumoured to travel backwards in time, Andy ‘Kentish’ Merrington emulates Jimmy Grimble by sweeping both competitions. It proves to be a remarkable day, with Rocky setting a record for ‘feeling his groin’, a near invisible Reloaded reaching two semi-finals – much to the delight of number one fan Tim Henman (“Come on Reloaded!”) and a small corner of St Albans is temporarily flooded by Ely. But the highlight comes after the event, when DS draw-a-thon Bakusho provides a terrifying glimpse into the mind of Swamps.
And finally comes perhaps the spiritual zenith of 2009 – the Great Nocky T surprise 360 extravaganza. The brittle-molared Cornish yokel captured the hearts and minds of his fellow Rodents when he had to shelve his long-held plans to buy Microsoft’s own enamel-coloured (and equally sturdy!) machine due to an impending dentist bill. A star appeared in the Sky, and the Messiah Ely proclaimed that the people of Rodentia should intercede in this cosmic injustice. So three wise Rodent wives were sent out onto the streets (along with Mogwins and Lilley, who did a roaring trade in the Welsh back alleys) to earn the cash to buy him an Elite.
It all ended with smiles and tears and more smiles, and possibly the best set of photos the site has ever seen.
And we all shared in the magic.
 It is red and there are rocks in it. We love unearthing a hidden gem at Daily Rodent, here’s one that did its best to stay buried through a terrible, terrible demo and by being second sequel to two disappointing forerunners.
Red Faction: Guerilla is fucking ace. It’s terribly broken in places, phenomenally polished in others and the combination makes for the very best type of videogaming fun – laughs derived from exploiting the busted bits while taking full advantage of the polish.
You’re a miner on Mars, your brave rebel-brother has been killed and it’s all gone wrong and, blimey, you end up getting roped into the rebellion and into sorting out the bad stuff. The Red Faction lineage is built from the idea that games might be more fun if you could smash-up the scenery. In the original this was somewhat selective – yeah, you could blast through steel if the game thought that might be okay but then a wooden door would stubbornly refuse to splinter even though it was clearly the sensible way to go forward. It wasn’t deal-breaking but it did a regular job of throwing you out of the story.
 If that's Martian? They can bash away all they like - won't even scratch it. Along comes Guerilla and finally the limits of the technology are less obvious – basically, if you want to smash it up… feel free. Oh except for the actual rock of Mars, oh no – that’s the most solidest thing ever. Given that you’ve come up here, from a whole damn planet away, to be a miner – ground that is impervious to pick axes and high explosive, tons and tons of high explosive, is probably going to mess with that career choice, somewhat. Bet that wasn’t in the job advert.
Actually, it probably was – the planet seems to be full of staggeringly dumb people, and that’s one of the reasons why I love it. None of your rebel mates, for example, bats an eyelid if you choose to systematically smash their safehouse to bits. They also like to wander in front of your truck whenever you’re keen to get underway – but actually run the fuckers over? Oh no, that’s bad for morale.
As for structure – six zones, free the people in each one by various means. Whatever, the story is weak but it’s the good sort of Saturday Matinee weak and you’re always glad of the next little revelation or progression.
This isn’t a review as such, you can read plenty of those elsewhere – we just wanted to tell you about some of the fun to be had with the brokeness of the game. What happens when you ignore the rules and go a bit mental.
Forumite Studd Ogg explains “Picture this: your mission is to kill General Mcfuck who is hiding out in a well-protected Military complex. You could sneak around, looking to pick-off the odd guard until you manage to get to the room with the target in and gun him down. You could find a nice sniper point and wait for him to get the pie from the window-ledge, then gun him down. Or you could get a massive truck and drive through the side of the building, drive over the General and the drive through all the other buildings around just for good measure. Always always drive the truck!”
Studd goes on to illustrate perfectly the brilliant randomess of Guerilla “At one point, I was hiding behind a wall during an epic gunfight. Red Faction helpers were being gunned down just to the right of me. I changed to my sticky mines ready to take-out a few EDF troops. I stood-up to throw the mine but it accidentally stuck on the belly of a an EDF truck that was just-then flipping over my wall having just driven through a petrol station and exploding it, taking out all around. I got right back behind the wall thinking ‘fuck that I’ll wait a bit longer, till things calm down a bit.”
 Ahh now, see, he's not thought that through: take the roof off and you can stop paying Council Tax and Business Rates on that place.
Personally, I have three favorite activities in Red Faction Guerilla:
1) Land-mine lawks
On some missions, you can start off with some nice distance-damage by chucking sticky mines over a wall for a bit, before charging in with some crazy weapons to kick people’s faces in. But you know that the military baddies will turn-up in their APCs and machine-gun cars behind you eventually – after some clueless fuck finally works out where the magic flying bombs are coming from… so, the trick is to lay a bunch of enemy-sensing land mines on the road and verges to the left and right of where you’re having fun.
The first you know of having been rumbled is when your peripheral vision is suddenly filled with three or four huge armoured vehicles doing flying ballet, sixty foot up in the low-g martian air accompanied by the sounds of baddies going ‘grrrr’.
Fucking love that – then the trick is generally to hop over the wall (or smash through it), grab a vehicle and screech out to lay low for a bit. Then go back to the mission where the bell-ends will be happily patrolling around the broken stuff like nothing has ever happened – Martian air makes angry bad people thick. Then stand in the same spot and repeat. Brilliant.
2) Drive-by Squash-a-thon
Quite often, your objective and your starting point are a good drive away, taking you past military checkpoints or small bases. So each time you zip off, you grab a hefty car, preferably a dust cart and ‘ooh, I’ve taken that corner a bit tight look – and them men have gorn under me wheels and their guard hut is a bit flatter than before too’. Eventually, you do so much damage that you can just walk up to the place, get out – plant some sticky mines un-hassled and roar off into the sunset laughing as you press detonate.
3) Sticky-mine Drive Thru
Most missions can be completed by carefully selecting a structure’s weak-points, watching the movements of the guarding troops and noting when the best moment to attack might be. Then assessing your equipment selection versus the likely escalation of the situation. Considered tactics are well rewarded in this game.
But…
You can also complete most missions by selecting a comedy car, attaching ten sticky mines to it – driving the fucker through the french windows. Smashing into a guard then leaping out – running through a wall or two and detonating the fucker while you hide out the back among the bins giggling. Even better is running upstairs in a tall building instead – then detonating and riding the collapsing mess down to ground level and then running away. Also giggling.
I loves it.
The fun of the sticky bombs is that you can scatter up to twelve of them before having to detonate the first. Makes for some terrific combos. You can make vehicles jump into the air with stickys and have them then land on standard proximity mines. You can make cars dance like this – such good fun.
Studd Ogg takes up the theme once again “On one amazing level, the EDF start to bomb Dust to kill the rebellion. You have to rush around saving people who haven’t really noticed the bombs are falling. You literally run up to them and say ‘You need to get out of here’, then you go to the next one. You don’t have to cram them all in to a truck or anything. My mind wonders as to why they don’t just leave but thats not really the point. The bombs come from all over the place. Many was the time I was sprinting for a vehicle just to see it get blown 60 ft in the air then land on the building I was trying to get in to. There is a really sense of panic as buildings collapse with you in them from the constant bombs. Well, panic for the player – the innocent bombing victims don’t seem to give a fuck.”
I finished the campaign this week – the final few missions are bloody hard. Worked fucking ages at them. I was helped by randomly finding eight super-rare ‘singularity bombs’ in some bint’s house. Perfect. Actually that was another brilliant moment – I came screaming through her apartment in a bin lorry and smashed her flatmate out through the far wall. Killed her stone-dead. So I got out and as I’m stealing her incredibly valuable singularity bombs she looks at me and says ‘Your brother would be very proud.’ Madness. Brilliant, brilliant madness.
BARGAIN ALERT: This bugger has plummeted to between £12 and £16 (on PS3, 360 and PC). Here’s a handy amazon link off which we make commission. Mwahahahahah.
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