Enough explaining what the hell I was thinking! On with the Stuff!

Ultra Combos!

If you’re familiar with Street Fighter IV, the fourth iteration of the series, not the ill-fated Ryu and Ken themed hypodermic needles, then you’ll love the amount of detail that went into these.

I just watched to see the incredibly good choreography and editing. What can I say, I’m a sucker for fight scenes. There’s even a sequel where the ladies get in on the action…

I need to hang out with stuntwomen more often…

Sucker Punch

After the hilarious 300 which couldn’t escape from being written by the supremely overrated Frank Miller and the amazing Watchmen which managed to not escape from being written by the much less overrated Alan Moore, Zack Snyder’s new film looks like something really worth looking forward to. Just watch the trailer!

I have no idea if the story’s going to be any good… and to tell you the truth, I don’t think I care! 300 was worth watching for the visuals alone, and the movie adaptation of Watchmen kept what was great from the original and added a few things we all wanted to see, beautiful fight scenes and Ozymandias getting punched in the face. Sucker Punch is all about the power of the imagination, something Zack obviously has in spades.

Anthony Saves the World

I only just found this little gem despite the fact the Escapist marketing department is desperate to make me watch it. Anthony Burch used to make these really good little videos about the science, psychology and meaning of video games, and now here he is making little action sequences. I was surprised but I gave it a go anyway.

Anthony saves the world: Episode 1 ‘Victory Points’

It’s not perfect, but the writing is great and the fights are fun. What more could you want?

Extra Credits

I’ve been following this series since it started. I hated the guys artificially sped up voice at first, but grew past it when I heard what he actually had to say.

Extra Credits: An open letter to EA marketing.

These videos are made by a trio of incredibly talented, intelligent people who work in the video games industry. Every week they make a new video that brings up new insights into how the industry works. I love it, and you probably will too.

Aperture Science explains Valentine’s day.

In the lead up to Valentine’s day, Valve released this little video.

I love that they always manage to make you laugh, but that they didn’t even have to mention the cake at any point! Special thanks to the lovely Miss Fleur for the heads up.

Justice League… You know what, just watch the video!

Yep, a Justice League porn film! Not only that, but there’s a company devoted to comic book themed porn! I don’t know what to say! Is it worse that comic nerds now have the disposable income to make superhero themed porn a viable business model, or that they were quicker at making this than DC were at making the real Justice League movie!

Won't the real Goldeneye 007 please stand up, please stand up?

For those of you that either aren’t into games or have been living in a cave for the last fifteen years, Goldeneye 64 was one of the best games on the N64 and paved the way for every single one of those games where you move around with a gun in the bottom left of the screen shooting people. Unlike most movie tie-in games, Rare actually took their time when developing the game and took one or two liberties with the story to make the best game they could, even if it took two years after the film was released for them to finish it. The result was an extremely innovative and well made shooter that had an immense amount of love for the James Bond series.

Unfortunately for developers like Activision, two years of hard work and innovative thinking is hard! So what’s a creatively and morally bankrupt bunch of wankers like Activision to do? Well, rip the name of a good N64 game and put it on the Wii where everything sells better!

The problem with that plan is that Goldeneye 64 is fourteen years old, and it has not aged gracefully since everybody’s spent the intervening years improving upon the foundations that Rare laid… if you just port the game over it wouldn’t pass muster when you have games like Call of Duty raising the bar in the meantime… So just paste the name of the film over a copy of Modern Warfare and let it sell! Maybe they will use the money they make to actually pay their developers alongside their new porcine aeronautics division.

The real James Bond in all his cube-faced glory!

Instead of Pierce Brosnan, the game stars a mannequin of Daniel Craig, presumably because of licensing, and not a single other actor from the original has returned for this version. Even Robbie Coltraine didn’t bother to turn up! The story meanders around from one vague reference to the original game to the next with next to no relation to the original movie. They could have made a completely new Bond story like with Blood Stone which would have allowed the story to actually make sense and would have also meant you wouldn’t know exactly where all the plot twists are… but that wouldn’t have the same brand recognition would it?

The game itself isn’t half bad, controlling with the Wiimote and Nunchuk is nice and solid even if it gives you the feeling that James Bond is drunk, you can also play with a classic or Gamecube controller, in which case it feels just like one of the many other shooters out on the market, except on the Wii.

There’s a full multiplayer to go with the game, and it’s just as much fun as Modern Warfare’s and the original Goldeneye’s versions. Get three mates round and you’ll have some fun shooting each other in the face. There is also an online multiplayer, but it uses Nintendo’s idiotic friend codes, and my experience of the online multiplayer consisted of ten minutes of waiting for the Wii to find a game before I went off to make a sandwich.

Funnily enough, with the Wii controller the famous bit where you shoot a guy in the toilet is impossible because you can't look down.

I don’t want to talk about the graphics too much, partly because criticising the Wii for its graphics is like criticising a wheelchair bound child for their lack of mobility, and partly because the game does pull a couple of tricks that impressed me once or twice. It’s one of those ‘Good for a Wii game’ instances where they’re making the best of what they’re given. What I can’t defend is the fact the game slows to an absolute crawl if anything important happens, that the story would make no sense whatsoever if you hadn’t seen the original movie and that this game only exists to try and cash in on the success of another game by another studio from fourteen years ago! I’d almost feel sad for Rare to have to see their baby exploited like this if it weren’t for the fact they’re probably overjoyed that they’re being remembered for something other than Kinect Sports.

If you have a Wii and enjoy your shooters, get Red Steel 2 first, it’s infinitely better thanks to the WiiMotion Plus and the fact it has swords in it. But if you get bored of that then I recommend you give this a whirl. If you have an Xbox, PC or a PS3 then you’re better off getting one of the many other, better shooters out there or Blood Stone which I actually enjoyed far more for all its faults because it actually tried something new.

While every single frame of Nintendo’s advertising and marketing has shown they want nothing to do with their old fans; that they’ve moved on in favour of cleaner, slimmer people that live in featureless white rooms and wear fixed smiles upon their faces. The sad fact is that the people it appeals to, normal people, don’t actually buy that many games. They buy something like Just Dance or Wii Party and play it every so often at parties… But the nerds will always come back for more every month or so.

So what is a faceless corporate machine to do? Why re-hash a sequel to one of your old series of course! Which brought us New Super Mario Brothers Wii (what happens when a sequel comes out? New-new super Mario brothers?) and now Donkey Kong Country Returns.

The story goes that a bunch of weird mask things have hypnotised all the animals to steal Mr Kong’s bananas… and when he turns out to be too stupid to hypnotise, he sets out to retrieve them one smashed skull at a time.

I will give it this. It’s a damn fine game, it’s so good you’d almost forget it’s on the Wii if it weren’t for the hand cramps you get from the controller. It plays like an old-school platformer with exploration and jumping on enemies to kill them. There’s nothing particularly special or new there, but Nintendo aren’t known for innovation any more, they’re known for their ability to polish something to such a degree that it almost seems brand new despite being utterly familiar.

I actually had flashbacks while playing this. Back in the days when I was but a lad and the word Wii would have made me giggle slightly more than it does now (hee hee!) I used to play games like The Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega genesis. Platform games with loads of exploration and incredible scenery… DKR does all of that, and does it brilliantly.

To remind players that they’re not just playing an emulator of a genesis game or something, the developers have done some really clever stuff with the scenery and levels with environmental effects and little hidey holes to explore. There is a level where the background is a storm along a shoreline and you have to find cover before a wave smashes you into the screen, and the water will blow any collectable items away if you don’t get them in time. I found it incredibly clever and very fun to find all the little details.

There is also a co-op mode where you can play with a friend, but I never found a reason to buy a second Wii controller so I didn’t get to try it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more fun than a barrel of monkeys in bowler hats, or that it causes fights over who has to be Diddy Kong.

If you’re a gamer and have a Wii, you would do well to give this game a try. Maybe with games like this and Zelda: Skyward Sword there will actually be a good reason for me to play the damn thing for anything other than iPlayer.

In Magicka you play as a wizard with command over the elements. Earth, cold, fire, water, life, arcane, shield and lightning. You pick up to five elements you want to use in your spell and let rip, and while you can stack five lightnings and just go nuts, your best bet is to combine them to see what results you can get. For instance, fire and earth combine to create a fireball you can shoot at your enemies. And if you get five earth elements and click the button to ‘perform on self’ you can drop a massive boulder on your head, killing yourself… I did that by accident and felt a bit silly.

The players have found over a thousand of these combinations and still there’s no end in sight, especially when you consider that there’s also the fact that not only can you combine your spells, but you can also combine them with spells from other players, or effects from the environment. For instance, you can’t perform lightning based spells when you’re wet, so I like to make a shield around myself and perform a rain spell that leaves everyone dripping wet and especially vulnerable to my ‘lightning-y electric death(TM)’. I’ve seen videos where players have exploited the fact that fire and cold explode in contact with each other and crossed beams of them to make the resulting explosion eviscerate entire legions of victims.

The game supports four player co-op play and I can’t wait to see what kind of madness we’ll get up to with another three wizards running around firing magic at stuff. And for only eight quid, that’s not a bad deal at all.

This game is also incredibly funny, dialogue is written in a sort of quasi-gibberish a bit like the chef from The Muppets, with real words peppered in here and there. I thought I’d find it annoying, but it’s actually quite charmingly funny (unless of course the language is actually Swedish, in which case boy is my face red!) And the game is full to bursting with pop-culture references and jokes that not only make you laugh but actually have use in gameplay. For instance, various weapons you can find include Excalibur… with the stone still attached, making it into a sort of hammer, A 40K warhammer (with extra darkness and grit) and an M60… as in the machine gun! This is the third comedic game I’ve seen this year with Bulletstorm and Duke Nukem forever. If both of those keep up the same standards as this, then I’ll be very happy indeed!

The graphics are nice, it’s not exactly Crysis but that’s no bad thing when the pretty lights of pure destructive force are filling the screen every five seconds and your PC has a little breathing room. The spells themselves are gorgeous to look at, and that’s all that matters really.

This game has had some serious technical issues from its release, my copy wouldn’t play because I’d made the mistake of having an Nvidia graphics card (Technophobes note: That’s basically half of all PC’s that play games.) and I’ve heard of people crashing out to the desktop, or characters not appearing, or cutscenes not starting. Yeah, it’s been a bit of a problem child. However, Arrowhead Studios have been patching it pretty much every day and fixing every problem pretty much within hours of finding them. So I’m not going to hold it against them.

If you have a Steam account already, give the demo a whirl. If you don’t, get one (it’s free) and give the demo a whirl anyway, Email me your Steam ID’s and we’ll wizard it up in this bitch!

Back in 2006, when the rumours started flying that the team at Family Guy were planning on doing a feature length Star Wars parody, there must have been a collection of nerds out there who couldn’t believe their luck. Blue Harvest, as the episode came to be known, was one of the most hyped DVD releases of the 2007, despite the fact that it wasn’t a ‘real’ film, but rather an hour-long television special, and ran to only 48 minutes without commercials. Still, a full endorsement from George Lucas and plenty of internet buzz meant that this release was much anticipated.

Now, I have a confession to make. The entire sum of my knowledge of Star Wars at that point came from the referential jokes on Family Guy prior to this making of this trilogy; I have never watched any of the originals.  So I wasn’t one of those anticipating it because I was a Star Wars fan. The entire appeal of this project to me was that it was yet another DVD to spend my money on – yet another Seth MacFarlane project to endorse. I pre-ordered the UK release, and waited.

I was pretty impressed with the final product. It was really funny, even to people like me who hadn’t seen the original, and from what I understand they went out of their way to make the shots etc true to the source material. I now know the basic premise of Star Wars enough to fake knowledge of them at parties. (I still haven’t seen the original movies, but my knowledge of them is much more in-depth thanks to these volumes and their commentaries. Did you know, for example, that “Blue Harvest” was the fake working title for Return of the Jedi? They didn’t want fans to mob the sets while they were filming.)

It was also great to see the Family Guy characters we all know and love transformed into people from an alternative story universe. The six key members of the Griffin family play the leading roles as you would expect (Stewie as Darth Vader, Brian as Chewie, Lois as Leia and so on), with neighbours Quagmire, Cleveland and Mort filling out the cast as C3P0, R2D2 and Lando Calrissian respectively (Meg takes her usual ribbing). The rest of the extended cast fill in the supporting roles, with very few mis-cast or doubled up (more on that later).

Overall, I quite enjoyed this offering. It seemed a great success for the creators, and judging by the commentary and what I’ve read they had great fun doing it too. It was a special project that they all got passionately involved in and devoted extra special effort to.  It was very well received by critics and fans and was even nominated for an Emmy.  Calls began to come in for a sequel…

Something, Something, Something Dark Side

… and in 2009, those calls were answered! The second instalment of the Family Guy trilogy was a straight-to-DVD parody of Empire Strikes Back (later aired as two episodes at the end of the 8^th season on American TV). The title came from a cutaway joke set up by Stewie in “Barely Legal”, an earlier episode of Family Guy, about the Emperor’s prefect formula for Star Wars dialogue.

But, something, something, something was different about this one. It lacked a certain energy, in my humble opinion, both from the production team and the final product. The jokes weren’t as clever or as snappy, and the plot seemed to drag at points, looking for something funny to say in expositional scenes and amid a much more serious story line. If I had seen it, maybe I could compare it to Empire vs A New Hope, but I all I can say is that I was slightly less than impressed with this DVD. It was okay, but not great; amusing but not side splitting. What I can offer by way of observation is that Blue Harvest was the product of the Volume 6 era, when the writing was still solid and the episodes still impressed me, while this one was being written round about the same time as Volume 9, which I didn’t think much of (see the review I wrote recently).

One thing that was impressive about this instalment – and the first one, come to that – was the animation. The graphics of Star Wars were revolutionary at the time; spaceships, believable alien Muppets, costumes, props, and foreign landscapes must have all impressed their viewers visually. And the Family Guy instalment has lived up to that with impressive use of CGI and wide screen format to make their style look as much like Lucas’ as possible. As a side note, this was the last ever episode of Family Guy to use hand-drawn anamatics, before transitioning to computer-designed ones.

Like I said, I’m not sure what Star Wars fans thought of this one in terms of accuracy or telling the story well. You’ll have to ask the sci-fi nerds about that one. All I know is that it relied a lot on the Family Guy nerds knowing their stuff – there were a lot of call-back jokes, bit characters, and inside references that people who aren’t as obsessed with Family Guy as I am might have missed out on.

Maybe it was because they churned this one out faster to please the fans, perhaps they realised that making fun of Star Wars has been done to death, or maybe it was because they’d done it before and it had lost its edge, but this offering just missed something. It’s longer than the first instalment – 52 minutes – and produced to the same high standard, but there was a certain apathy that seemed to come across on the commentary and which was obvious in the footage. They had stopped caring.

It’s a Trap!

And, by the time the third movie rolled around, everyone knew it. The episode opens as the other two did, with a power outage killing the TV, leading to Peter telling the Star Wars story to pass the time; “We have to do Jedi now, don’t we?”, asks Stewie in a defeated tone, and Peter asks him to shut up and just let him get through this. The opening scroll across space also portrays this sense of rushing to the finish line to complete the set: “Luke Skywalker has returned to his home planet of Tatooine in order to—okay, you know what, we don’t care. We were thinking of not even doing this one. Fox made us do it… Look, just do me a huge favour and lower your expectations, okay?”

With the creators even admitting to not believing in their own product anymore, there’s not really anywhere else to go but disappointment. Don’t get me wrong – this is, once again, a vaguely entertaining and funny movie. It’s still visually brilliant, and it rounds off the trilogy well. But there’s no passion any more, and it followed the slow steady slope of decline in quality that Family Guy has offered me of late. Oddly however, given that they have apparently tired of the project, it is the longest of the three episodes, and the DVD features a good six minutes of footage not seen when it was aired on TV, again as a two-parter.

This offering is the most complex and fast paced of the three. I am told that Return of the Jedi is the best out of the original movies, so perhaps the few remaining fans on the production team wanted to do it justice. Sadly, all the additional new characters posed a problem for the writers: they were out ofFamily Guy stock characters to fill the roles. So, they fell back on cameos from Roger and Klaus from American Dad (the highlight of the hour for me, which says something) and Rollo and Tim the Bear from The Cleveland Show. They also re-cast some of their lesser characters into second roles.

Which is my one big complaint about this offering: one of the most talked about things on the net was who “was going to play Jabba the Hutt?” Most people speculated Meg as the obvious choice, but she had already been cast as two different space monsters and ended up playing a third in this film. Who did they go with? Joe Swanson.

Completely mis-cast in my humble opinion – it seems the only reason he got the part was because he was the only main character who hadn’t been used (except for two bit parts) already. I’ll give them credit that they got almost all the other characters down pretty well, as far as I can tell, but this one casting decision seemed to make little sense to me. I don’t know who else I would have gone with, (perhaps Stan from American Dad, if you’re looking for the real enemy of the Family Guy universe) but Joe is one of my favourites, and casting him as the bad guy sullied the rest of this film for me.

Overall, I would recommend this box set. It’s a part of the Family Guy canon now, and it’s not bad. Maybe a Star Wars fan would love (or hate) it more than I do, but all I can offer is that it’s a quick and humorous way to educate yourself about Star Wars without actually having to sit down and watch all three full-length originals. And it does justice to the cast and style of Family Guy too. But lower your expectations if you’ve read the hype surrounding this series and are expecting something groundbreaking.

It was recently released it as a complete trilogy, and that is how it will stay. They have stated emphatically that they will not be doing the prequels. “Maybe Cleveland can do those” says Peter, as we fade to the Family Guy credits done in George Lucas style, and fans of Family Guy and Star Wars alike breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over.

Bulletstorm is just one of the games that shows we’ve grown beyond such childish, jingoistic shit and moved to a more mature and nuanced era… an era where you get extra points for shooting someone in the willy!

Unlike other FPSs where the only real objective is to not die while making other things die by lining your crosshairs up over their head. Bulletstorm encourages and rewards you for being a little more imaginative with your murderising. Shooting them in the face till he falls down? Meh, nul points! Shooting them in the bumhole and kicking them in the face? Better. Shooting them in the willy, wrapping them in grenade bolas and kicking him into a crowd of his mates? Now you’re talking!

The demo only contains one level, but the entire intro video explains in quite a lot of detail about how you can go over the same level over and over again trying out different combinations and kill methods to come up with the best score which you can compare with your friends.

With any other game, this demo would last all of five minutes. I was playing this for hours. It turns out shooting a guy in the willy is harder than you’d think, it’s a much smaller target than you’re used to with popping headshots, and every time I played I’d find a new way to hurt someone. It’s a surprisingly cerebral experience trying to think up a new way to kill an enemy every single time. It’s like Just a minute with guns.

The demo doesn’t even bother to explain what the story actually is, instead deciding to break the fourth wall and refer to itself as a demo of a videogame you haven’t bought yet. “Challenge yourself, beat your best score? Well what else are ya gonna do? Read a book? HAR HAR!

The developers at People can Fly have a really good sense of humour and that’s really shone with their marketing. And that alone earns my respect. If we’ve learned anything from Call of Duty it’s that trying to be subtle just doesn’t work. All of those past-death quotes about how war is bad and soldiers are just murderers didn’t penetrate into the gaming populace, so let’s just drop any pretence and go kill some sentient creatures in increasingly vindictive ways.

It looks like this and Duke Nukem Forever are the start of a new trend, a trend of silly shooters with big guns and bigger characters. Right now it’s refreshing and hilarious and fun. But what will we think of it in five years? Will these become the new ‘boring brown shooters’?

My answer? Hell no! Shooting people in the willy will always be fun!

As a great philosopher once said. “Hey dick-tits! This game ain’t gonna pre-order itself!”

Wise words my friend. Wise words indeed.

Bulletstorm will be released on the 22nd of February. If you’re on the fence you can download the demo over Xbox Live or Playstation Network. If you do nothing else you at least have to try that.

The story follows a Kiwi bird called Ivy, she’s looking for her mother. That’s it. The levels consist of Ivy walking around completely oblivious to any obstacles or deathtraps in her way, changing direction only when she hits a wall or a slope that’s too steep for her to walk up, you have to draw lines of Ivy on to the level to make ramps for her to walk up or platforms to walk on or catapaults to fire her straight into walls. She can also walk on them as you draw them, so you can either gently lift her over spikes and fire and stuff, or if you’re feeling frisky you can fling her over them and try to catch her.

It’s basically Lemmings but without the senseless violence, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was looking after a feathery Mister Magoo.

Every level opens with Ivy making this high pitched ‘cute’ Mweee wee! sound that… well maybe I’m not being fair, I do like cute things normally, I like charming things with personality and a kind streak, but that sound hits me like a brick covered in ground glass. It’s trying so hard to be cute I just find it infuriating. Maybe that’s just me, I’m just doing this review so I can get on with writing about BulletStorm so, my sensibilities probably lie elsewhere right now. Look this game up on Youtube and see how it makes you feel if you’re interested. But I could feel my testicles slowly shrinking as I played.

The graphics are functional and little else. The levels are made of stone blocks laid out into an obstacle course, the only variation between them to remind you that you’ve actually got anywhere is a different watercolour painted background every now and again. They’re quite pretty, but they don’t exactly add anything. The music would change with each world, but they’re recycled between worlds. Don’t play this for any length of time. It will become the sound of your nightmares.

The gameplay follows the Wii’s noble tradition of being incredibly simple to learn and hard to master, and the Wii’s shovelware tradition of not actually expecting you to be capable of mastering anything. The problem is that each new element is added so slowly that you will get bored waiting for the game to deem you worthy of learning about how ‘enemies’ work. Again, I shouldn’t complain, I’m not eight years old so I’m probably not in the target market. But on the other hand, when I was eight I’d have probably thought this game was too easy as well.

Overall, it’s a nice game with some good ideas and some clever puzzles if the style suits you, but I would recommend the DS version over the Wii version as it’s made for short plays while on the bus or waiting for the STD clinic results to come back. Playing it for any length of time will get repetitive and infuriating, but in short bursts it might be a nice little distraction from the fact you’re in an STD clinic.

It’s almost a breath of fresh air to see that Dead Rising 2 opens with you participating in a game show where you compete to kill the most zombies on motorbikes with chainsaws bolted on, as in you’re on the motorbikes not the zombies. The game can be only so good.

I haven’t played the first game, which tried to make a statement about the evils of consumerism while leaving all the in-game text too small to read unless you bought a big screen HDTV to play it on. But this game basically follows the old formula of giving the player several days to play around in a large area filled with squishy zombies to kill with anything they can find. I’ve thrown fire extinguishers, cash registers and baseball bats, I’ve put buckets on their heads and laughed as they flail around unable to see you, I’ve rammed them with wheelchairs, I’ve shot them with a bow and arrows. If you find it, you can use it. If it’s edible, you can eat it, if it’s wearable, you can wear it.

There is a plot following Chuck Greene, a former motocross champion who has to find the anti-zomberculosis antidote

for his daughter every 24 hours. He gets caught in an outbreak in the middle of Vegas and it’s your job to find boxes of

‘Zombrex’ while saving any survivors you can. But really all you’re going to do is cellotaping a chainsaw to a canoe oar and trying to see how many zombies you can kill while wearing a gimp suit.

Beneath the comparatively straight-laced plot of this game lies a hilariously silly undercurrent, you can ride around on a little pink bicycle with stabilizers or beat zombies to death with dildos, if you find a pink frilly dress you can wear it, if you cellotape a bag of gems to a torch you can make a lightsaber.

New to this game is the ability to create improvised weapons by combining two objects to create new ones. For instance a box of nails and a baseball bat creates a bat with nails in it. A robot teddy-bear and a heavy machine gun creates a foul-mouthed yet adorable automated sentry turret. Playing with different combinations and testing them out is half the fun of this game.

You progress through the story by rescuing survivors and taking down psychopaths like a chef that’s started using people in his recipes and a bunch of sniper hillbillies, while slowly uncovering the mystery behind the outbreak of the infected. Unfortunately I ran out of time in the middle of a boss fight and would have had to restart the story from the beginning, at which point I had to stop stalling and get my next game from LoveFilm before my months allowance ran out. But I’ll be back, as soon as it goes down in price a little, it was fun to explore the world, find new things to do, meet new people and find new ways to kill them.

If you’re looking for a good, fun game to play this year. You can do far worse than Dead Rising 2.

Blood Stone went a little way to help me feel better about the series. Not because it’s particularly good, but at least there was a little of the absurdly ridiculous stunts more in touch with the Bonds of yesteryear.

The story follows our friend James trying to stop some villainous guy doing something evil that will do something horrible. I’d forgotten the plot until I looked it up on wikipedia just now. There are gun fights, there is gadgetry in the form of a smart phone that gives you detective vision from Batman Arkham Asylum, there is a section where you drive a tow truck through the streets of Shanghai chasing a giant dump truck, and a section where you chase a train through Siberia in your Aston Martin along a frozen river bed.

So that’s gadgets and stunts covered, what about girls? Well, the talents of Joss Stone have been lent to the game in the form of a terrifying waxwork model that can’t act. It is a sad day when you do through an entire James Bond story and he doesn’t get up to any knobbing. But at least they’re trying.

Aaaaaaaah!

Gameplay consists of cover based shooting with a few nice twists. James has the consistency of paper mache under fire, butif you get close to an enemy and you can perform a ‘takedown’ at the press of a button. After about eight hours of gameplay I was still discovering new ways James could obliterate people in front of him. Up close, James was like a tiger made of chainsaws, the takedowns were beautifully animated and were fit to whatever environment James was in, if the enemy was against a wall, James would slam his head into it, if he was below him on some stairs James would just kick them in the face. I could have watched him punch people in the bollocks all day. Each one of these takedowns earned you a ‘Focus Aim’, which would allow James to zone in on an individual enemy and perform a perfect one hit kill. So three dead enemies up close means three dead enemies who had the common sense to snipe at you from the other side of the map. It was beautifully cathartic and genuinely thrilling to try to kill everything that way instead of popping out from behind a table to make pot-shots. Ninety percent of the time I’d just run across the battlefield at people to beat them to death instead of use the rifle I had on me. One section of the game where I had to make my way through a futuristic sea-plane actually sent shivers down my spine when three blokes tried to jump me in a doorway, three brutalisations later and James pulled his PPK out and fired three shots at the three guards at the other end of the room, all within the space of three seconds. Three seconds, three shots, six deaths.

Guess how many I'm going to punch to death?

I can’t help but feel they missed a trick by not focusing on this mechanic more. Maybe finding a way to accumulate more focus kills through stealth and cunning, maybe a way of rewarding efficiency and finesse rather than playing Gears Of War in tuxedos.

As it is it’s not a very good James Bond story, but it’s definitely worth a rent or buying for cheap for the chance to watch Daniel Craig punch people in the willy.

I actually didn’t think it was all that good.

There. I said it. And I think Seth MacFarlane would be proud of me for doing so: after all, he was the man who famously said (via Stewie) that he wanted to hurt “The guys who watched the Simpson’s back in 1994, and won’t admit the damn thing isn’t funny anymore”. As someone who still has a huge amount of respect and admiration for the earlier canon of the series, I am just being honest and true to their own lessons by not remaining a slavishly adoring fan when they have ceased producing work which entertains and amuses me as much as it used to. I tried to be loyal and stick out the slump (in fact, Seasons 7 & 8 impressed me more with subsequent viewings than they did at first), but it’s now looking like that confidence was misplaced. It’s been, in my humble opinion, a downwards slope since about midway through Season 6, and I don’t see it being back on the way up any time soon.

I’ll still be watching to see what happens, of course. Like I said, I’m still madly in love with the earlier offerings (and their creators), and I still LIKE the show enough to keep coming back for more. It’s not bad television, per se. It just doesn’t leave me as satisfied as it used to, and that’s a disappointment. The jokes aren’t clever (insult, insult, fart, bowel movement, fart, mock the Jews…); the plots are getting more and more far fetched, and I miss the days when Stewie was evil and subtle instead of just overtly gay.

But don’t you worry, money crunchers at FOX; you can still count on my £20 for Volume 10. I just hope it’s a better collection than this last one – and that dear old Seth and his team have the courage, before there’s a volume 11 to pull them further into the pit, to put their own hands up and admit that enough is enough when it comes to the adventures of the Griffin Family. (Have you seen what’s happened with Scrubs? It’s much better to just let something die, with dignity. Think of shows like Friends, Frasier and MASH. They all stopped before they got to the point of flogging a dead horse, and they’re still respected and admired today for a good long run and a graceful exit on a high.)

Yes, I really just said that: I don’t want to see Family Guy go on forever and ever, not if it’s going to keep being more of the same that we’ve seen lately. It’s a historic, and kind of sad, day. But admitting it is the first step, and I know that I’m not the only one out there who shares that sentiment. A lot of fans feel let down. I personally think that they should write the show a fitting ending, and then leave it at that. I might even be excited about the odd Family Guy feature length release, if they did it like the older stuff. But I wasn’t overly impressed with this latest offering on the whole.

So, that’s the reason for the delay in the review, and pretty much the gist of my feelings about the new offerings. But don’t let that put you off borrowing a copy off someone or watching some episodes on TV; they’re not awful, just they’re not as good as they used to be. The plots are solid, if relying a bit heavily on the same transparent structure over and over again. The characters are all those you know and love (plus a few new B characters that are enjoyable in small doses). They’re still funny, they’re just not ‘laugh out loud, holding my sides, quote it to your friends for the next six months’ funny.

I would add one addendum to the above: the sequence where Stewie and Brian go into an alternative universe where everything is Disney-fied is pure comedy genius. (In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the whole Road to the Multiverse episode is almost as good as any in Season 5.) Worth the price of the DVD on its own, seeing the Family Guy cast beautifully animated, bright eyed and busy-tailed, and singing about pie almost makes up for the less brilliant moments across the rest of the episodes. If only they hadn’t ruined it by ending on a Jew joke, it might have made it into my Top 20 favourite moments. I cannot even begin to describe this joyous scene, so do please find a way to view it if you’ve been feeling as jaded with the show as I have of late: it will restore your faith in the franchise.

I sincerely hope that either things improve/revert to their original state, or that the team accept that it’s past its peak, and end it on their own terms while the fans are still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t mean to say that this latest poorer offering sullies any of the genius of the previous ones, or that there’s nothing redeeming about the entire volume, but just rather that the whole thing left me with a taste of “Oh, was that it?” on this occasion. I expected more. This is also why I don’t want Seth MacFarlane to stop altogether. American Dad is still consistently strong, and his other projects are admirable. And Family Guy will always be my favourite of his offerings, and I do feel he’s made his mark on history with it. But perhaps it’s time to try something new folks.