Music Riding

So first thing first, I finished Resident Evil 4 and it's generous extra content. I'm truly impressed by it, and I'd even go as far to call it a masterpiece to be honest. The gunplay is great, the bosses astoundingly over the top and I even quite enjoy the storyline ( while acknowledging it's served on huge slices of cheese). The most interesting thing about the game in my mind is that it successfully marries the gloom and darkness of a traditional horror game with quintessentially videogame touches. Why does Ada Wong wear an evening gown to infiltrate a militaristic religious cult? How does the Merchant carry around twice his own body weight in weapons and still get everywhere first? The knowing winks in the direction of the audience and the stylisation of the whole thing successfully walk the knife-edge between believability (relatively speaking of course, this being a game where people sprout tentacles from their necks) and lunacy. Perhaps my only criticism of the game comes towards the end as it abandons the more earlier more atmospheric confines and resorts to more typical Resident Evil locations (underground labs, military complexes etc), which is coupled with the climatic rise in action to occasionally make you feel like you're playing a militaristic third-person shooter more than a tense horror game. That said, high quality is maintained and there's a great ending to wrap it up. So it's a fantastic game, and probably makes it onto my personal top ten.

In the wake of such a gripping adventure, I've taken a step back from 'core' games for a while to focus on some more relaxing pursuits. Chief among these has been Audiosurf, a fantastic little bit of fun that was a finalist in the Independent Games Foundation awards earlier this year. essentially the game is a score attack that involves flying a ship along a track hoovering up coloured blocks, very similar to Harmonix's twin titles FreQuency and Amplitude. The clever bit is in the coding, which will take any of your own music and transform it into a playable track ingame. Combined with trippy wireframe visuals ala Rez, this makes it, depending on the music, and deeply relaxing pursuit or a frenzied score attack, and global leaderboards allow you to compare your performance against others. The game is on Steam now, and priced at just $10 US, it's a bit of a steal. Play it, and I recommend 'Bittersweet Symphony' by The Verve. I'm not normally into indie games as I prefer my games to have a great deal of depth and polish, but this one is a gem, and I can see myself playing it a lot in the upcoming weeks